🛣️LiteLLM
The fastest, litest AI Gateway. Rust core with Python SDK. Call 100+ LLM APIs in OpenAI (or native) format with cost tracking, guardrails, load balancing, and logging [Bedrock, Azure, OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenAI, VertexAI, vLLM, Nvidia NIM]
⭐ Hugely popular: 56k stars, gaining about 582 a week
View on GitHub ↗repo profile
momentum
durability
bus factor = how many people it takes to cover more than half the commits (6 months). 1 is a solo project; higher means the work is spread across a team. top-author share is the single busiest author's slice of those commits.
since we covered it
why it's a big deal
- With Portkey heading into Palo Alto's Prisma AIRS, LiteLLM is the most mature OSS analog that stays self-hostable and provider-agnostic.
- It treats the AI gateway as a primitive, not a product - virtual keys, per-team spend ledgers, and provider fallback shipped as a library you run yourself.
- Battle-tested at over 10B tokens and shipping roughly 394 pull requests a month, it is the gateway layer small teams and enterprise alike keep reaching for.
under the hood
- Dual-mode: drop-in Python library (litellm.completion(...)) or standalone FastAPI proxy server with admin UI.
- Per-provider adapter pattern translates OpenAI-format requests and streams to native provider SDKs, with first-class guardrails, retries, and load balancing.
- Multi-tenant from the start - virtual API keys, team and user spend tracking, per-key model allow-lists.
our take from PR#34, 2026-05-20
star history
- PR#34 46k 2026-05-20
- now 56k + 10k since first covered
curve is sampled from GitHub's star history, plus our own daily readings since we covered it; the dashed stretch is before we first covered it, the solid line since. figures at coverage are the numbers we printed then (approx.), current count is live.
understory
Quietly building: more output than attention, for now.
- output, commits & releases
- clout, star velocity
output = commits & releases; clout = star velocity, both 0 to 100 monthly indices; the gap where output runs above clout is the understory. The understory →
covered in
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The OSS AI gateway that stays independent post-Portkey
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