<aside> ⚖️ A developer's honest comparison of the two most popular AI API gateways.

</aside>

Both OpenRouter and Crazyrouter let you access multiple AI models through a single API. But they differ significantly in pricing, model coverage, and developer experience. Here's my comparison after using both for 3+ months.

Pricing

• OpenRouter: Adds a markup on top of provider pricing. GPT-4o costs more than going direct to OpenAI.
• Crazyrouter: ~55% discount on overseas models, ~90% on domestic models. Consistently cheaper than both direct API and OpenRouter.

Model Coverage

• OpenRouter: ~300 models, strong on open-source models
• Crazyrouter: 627+ models, includes both overseas (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) and domestic (DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, Kimi) providers

API Compatibility

Both are OpenAI-compatible. You can use the standard OpenAI SDK with both — just change the base_url.

# OpenRouter
client = openai.OpenAI(base_url="<https://openrouter.ai/api/v1>", api_key="sk-or-...")

# Crazyrouter
client = openai.OpenAI(base_url="<https://crazyrouter.com/v1>", api_key="sk-...")

Unique Features

• OpenRouter: Community model rankings, app-level API keys
• Crazyrouter: Image generation (DALL-E 3, Imagen 4, Gemini Image), video generation (Sora, Kling), TTS, STT, music generation — all through the same API

My Verdict

If you only need text models and prefer community features, OpenRouter is solid. If you want the lowest prices, broadest model coverage (especially domestic models), and multimodal capabilities (image/video/audio), Crazyrouter is the better choice.

Try Crazyrouter free: crazyrouter.com