Envoy AI Gateway vs Orq.ai
Envoy AI Gateway
aigateway.envoyproxy.io
Orq.ai
orq.aiSide by side
| Figure | Envoy AI Gateway | Orq.ai |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 2 |
| Spec score · LLM Gateway Software | 8.4 (#8) | 7.7 (#18) |
| Spec score · LLM gateways | 8.4 (#10) | 7.9 (#15) |
| Deployment | The CLI can run locally on Linux and macOS, and production deployment uses Kubernetes with Envoy Gateway. | Listed deployment options include EU SaaS, VPC, and on-premises. |
| Founded | 2024 | 2023 |
| Intended users | The documentation identifies teams sharing models or tools, seeking centralized credentials, quotas, usage attribution, or failover as likely users. | The company describes Orq.ai as a platform for engineering and product teams building and shipping LLM applications together. |
| Observability | The CLI supports OpenTelemetry tracing and can record request and response details; the documentation describes configuration to hide input and output content. | Orq.ai provides request traces, cost and token tracking, dashboards, and OpenTelemetry ingestion. |
| Support | The project directs users to its community Discord and GitHub issues for help. | The pricing page lists email support with priority SLA and a Slack or Teams channel as a Teams add-on; Enterprise includes Slack/Teams support. |
Plans
In their own words
Envoy AI Gateway
Envoy AI Gateway, now named Agent Router, is an open-source control plane for managing AI and agent traffic through Envoy. It provides an OpenAI-compatible API for hosted and self-hosted models and MCP servers, with integrations for providers including OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Google Gemini, AWS Bedrock, Mistral, and Anthropic. Traffic controls include model virtualization, provider failover, token quotas, and usage-based rate limiting. Its MCP gateway supports server multiplexing, tool routing, OAuth authentication, and observability; InferencePool support adds routing and load balancing for inference endpoints. Credentials can be managed centrally, and supported short-lived credential flows include AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, and GCP Vertex AI. The project describes metrics collection and monitoring for AI workloads. The free open-source project is listed at free. Its CLI supports local use on Linux and macOS; production Kubernetes deployment uses Envoy Gateway and requires compatible dependencies. The project uses the Apache 2.0 license and points users to Discord and GitHub issues for help.
Orq.ai
Orq.ai is an AI gateway and platform for routing, governing and observing requests to models and tools. Through an OpenAI-compatible API, it lists more than 500 models from over 30 providers. Smart Router can select models by cost or quality strategy, with fallbacks, retries and load balancing. Controls include budgets, spend limits, guardrails and PII redaction. Observability covers request traces, cost and token tracking, dashboards and OpenTelemetry ingestion. Integrations include OpenAI and Anthropic APIs, Python and Node SDKs, remote MCP servers, Azure AI Foundry, Vertex AI and compatible endpoints. It supports Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and more than 25 agent frameworks. Deployment options are EU SaaS, VPC and on-premises. Orq.ai says prompts, outputs and traces are not used to train models, and lists EU residency and retention controls. Pay-as-you-go is free, usage-based, with provider-rate model charges and stated allowances.