Finest vs LiteLLM
Last updated 2026-08-19
LiteLLM is an open-source SDK and proxy that gives your code one interface to over a hundred LLM providers; you host it, you write the routing and fallback rules, and it costs nothing but the operating. Finest is a managed gateway that makes the routing decision for you and is accountable for it: substitutions happen only where sealed evidence proves quality holds, every request carries a receipt, and the fee is 25% of proven savings. Pick LiteLLM to own the plumbing. Pick Finest to buy the outcome.
| At a glance | Finest | LiteLLM |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Managed optimization gateway | Open-source proxy and SDK you operate |
| Routing logic | Evidence-bound, published, versioned | Rules you write and maintain |
| Cost | No model markup. 25% of proven savings per request. No saving, no fee. | Free software; your infrastructure and upkeep |
| Quality control | Pre-registered bars, validator escalation | Yours to build |
| Proof of value | A receipt per request: model served, evidence, saving. | Logs and spend tracking you assemble |
| Hosting | None to run | Self-hosted (its managed offering is separate) |
Choose Finest when
- You want the bill driven down without owning routing rules, eval harnesses, or a proxy deployment.
- You need substitutions you can defend: sealed evidence, escalation on refusal, and a receipt per request.
- You want the vendor paid from savings rather than paid regardless.
Choose LiteLLM when
- Traffic must stay inside your network, on infrastructure you control end to end.
- You want one code interface to a very long tail of providers and are happy writing the policy yourself.
- You have platform engineers who want full control of retries, fallbacks, and budgets in config.
Interface layer and decision layer
LiteLLM answers the question "how do I call all of these providers the same way." It is very good at that: one client shape, key management, retries, spend tracking, all in software you can read. What it deliberately does not answer is "which model should this request use," because that is policy, and LiteLLM leaves policy to you.
Finest exists for exactly that question. It measures which configurations clear a pre-registered quality bar for each task class, publishes the evidence, routes only within what the evidence authorizes, and escalates to your requested model the moment a cheaper arm refuses or fails a validator. The decision, and the accountability for it, move to Finest.
They compose
Finest speaks the OpenAI and Anthropic wire shapes, so any client that can set a base URL can point at it, and that includes LiteLLM. Teams that standardized on LiteLLM for the interface can route the traffic that matters through Finest and keep their code unchanged. The choice is not either-or; it is whether anyone is accountable for the spend.
What free actually costs
LiteLLM the software is free. The routing policy it executes is only as good as the evaluation behind it, and that evaluation is the expensive part: building task-class corpora, setting bars, re-running them when prompts and models change, and answering for regressions. Finest's position is that this work is the product. If the proof engine finds no savings on your traffic, you pay nothing, which prices the experiment of finding out at zero.
Questions people ask
- Is Finest open source like LiteLLM?
- The gateway is a managed service, not a self-hosted proxy. What is published instead is the evidence: versioned bars, receipts, and a verification surface at finest.so/verification.
- Can I use LiteLLM and Finest together?
- Yes. LiteLLM can point at Finest the way it points at any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so the interface layer and the decision layer stack.
- Does Finest support as many models as LiteLLM?
- Finest routes among the frontier providers it prices and measures, and serves OpenAI Chat Completions and Anthropic Messages. LiteLLM's catalog is broader; Finest's claim is depth of evidence on the traffic that carries real spend.
In 2 minutes, start cutting your API spend without sacrificing quality. Free if you don’t save money.
No model markup. You pay the host’s rate. 25% of what it proves it saved on a request. No saving, no fee.