The best LLM proxies for AI coding agents, ranked
Ranked specifically for one job: sitting in front of coding agents on a developer's own machine. A tool that's excellent for a shared team gateway can still rank lower here if that isn't what it's built for.
- 1SProbe0Local-only proxy built around coding-agent traffic specifically — routing, caching and a spend cap tuned for the shape of agent tool calls.
- 2ALiteLLMThe default answer for one API in front of 100+ providers. Self-hosted or cloud, built for shared/team deployment more than a single dev's machine.
- 3APortkeyHosted gateway with strong observability and caching; the tradeoff is your traffic routes through Portkey's infrastructure.
- 4BHeliconePrimarily an observability layer — logging, cost tracking, prompt analytics. Useful visibility, not built to route or cap spend itself.
- 5BOpenRouterA model marketplace and unified API more than a proxy for your own machine — great for trying models, not for local-first spend control.
- 6BCloudflare AI GatewayHosted at the edge with caching, retries, fallback and dollar budgets. Managed infrastructure you never patch, but nothing runs on your machine.
- 7BLangfuseOpen-source tracing and evaluation for LLM apps. Strong for understanding agent behaviour after the fact; it is not sitting in the request path enforcing limits.
- 8CVercel AI GatewayUnified model access with failover, tightly integrated if you already deploy on Vercel. Aimed at app traffic rather than a local CLI.
- 9COllamaNot a gateway — a local model runner, and an excellent one. It is what a local-routing proxy points at, not a substitute for one.
- 10CLM StudioA desktop app for running local models with a friendly UI and an OpenAI-compatible server. Same story as Ollama: a destination, not a router.
This list is scoped to one use case on purpose: a developer running Claude Code, Codex or Cursor locally who wants routing, caching and a spend limit without standing up shared infrastructure. On a different axis — team-wide gateway deployment, say — this ranking would look different, and tools like LiteLLM and Portkey would move up.
Probe0 ranks first here because it's the only one of these built exclusively for that local, single-developer case: no server to run, local model routing verified with an actual round trip, and a hard spend cap that pauses a run rather than just reporting on it afterward.
The rest of the list earns its place for real reasons — LiteLLM's provider coverage, Portkey's hosted observability, Helicone's logging depth, OpenRouter's model marketplace — they're just solving a broader or different problem than the one this list is ranking against.