Switchyard vs Commercial LLM API Providers
Most coding agents are designed to call commercial API providers directly: Claude Code calls Anthropic's API, Codex calls OpenAI's API. Every token is billed, and you cannot control model selection at runtime. Switchyard sits between the agent and the backend, translating API formats and routing to open-source models like vLLM, NVIDIA NIM, or Ollama instead.
| Feature | Switchyard | Commercial APIs |
|---|
| License | Apache-2.0 | Proprietary |
| Self-hosting | Yes | No |
| Token billing | None (your infrastructure) | Per-token |
| Protocol translation | OpenAI and Anthropic | Single format per provider |
| Multi-backend routing | Yes | No |
Switchyard is the better choice when you want to run coding agents against open-source models on your own infrastructure, control routing behavior at request time, or benchmark multiple models without per-token costs. Commercial APIs remain the better fit when you need the latest frontier models, uptime guarantees, or no infrastructure management overhead.
Switchyard vs OpenRouter
OpenRouter is a commercial API aggregation service that provides access to many models through a unified API. Like Switchyard, it abstracts model selection behind a single endpoint. Unlike Switchyard, OpenRouter is a managed service with no self-hosting option; Switchyard runs on your own servers.
OpenRouter does not perform API format translation between OpenAI and Anthropic schemas; Switchyard does. For teams who need Anthropic Messages format requests to reach an Ollama or vLLM backend, Switchyard handles the translation that OpenRouter does not.
Switchyard is the better fit for teams with infrastructure capacity who want routing logic under their own control and need cross-format translation. OpenRouter is the better fit for teams who want access to many hosted models without managing servers or writing routing configuration.
