OpenRouter vs Groq
Compare OpenRouter and Groq on pricing, free tier, open source, API, self-host, verdict and momentum.
Both are dev-infra tools. OpenRouter is freemium (pay-per-token pass-through plus a small fee) with an API, a free tier; Groq is freemium (free tier; from $0.075/1M tokens (small models)) with an API and a free tier. The catalog stamp is ship for OpenRouter and ship for Groq, last verified 2026-09-01 and 2026-08-24 respectively.
Auto-paired from catalog data — the verdicts are hand-set, the pairing is algorithmic.
OpenRouter
One API for every major model — unified billing, fallbacks and routing.
Groq
Ultra-fast inference on custom LPU hardware — open models at 500+ tok/s.
| field | OpenRouter | Groq |
|---|---|---|
| pricing | freemium · pay-per-token pass-through plus a small fee | freemium · free tier; from $0.075/1M tokens (small models) |
| free tier | yes | yes |
| open source | no | no |
| api | yes | yes |
| self-host | no | no |
| verdict | ship | ship |
| momentum | blueshift | blueshift |
| last verified | 2026-09-01 | 2026-08-24 |
| key limitation | Small markup over direct API pricing. | Model catalog limited to what fits their hardware. |
The call
Pick OpenRouter for apps that should route across labs without a custom gateway.
Pick Groq for real-time UIs that die at 2-second model latency.
OpenRouter sources
Groq sources
Open live compare →OpenRouter pageGroq pageOpenRouter.jsonGroq.json