The deciding difference is operational: LiteLLM can run on infrastructure you control, Anthropic cannot. If that constraint is real for you, it settles the choice before anything else is considered.
Claude Opus, Sonnet and Haiku. Strong tool use and long-horizon agentic work.
Enable prompt caching on the system prompt and tool definitions — it is the single biggest cost lever.
Self-hosted proxy that speaks one API to 100+ providers, with keys and budgets.
Give every agent its own virtual key so you can attribute and cap spend per surface.
| Anthropic | LiteLLM | |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | Proprietary | Open source |
| Pricing | usage based | open source |
| Self-hostable | No | Yes |
| Languages | TypeScript, Python | Python, TypeScript |
| Install | npm install @anthropic-ai/sdk | pip install 'litellm[proxy]' |
| Keys required | ANTHROPIC_API_KEY | None |
The deciding difference is operational: LiteLLM can run on infrastructure you control, Anthropic cannot. If that constraint is real for you, it settles the choice before anything else is considered. Anthropic: Claude Opus, Sonnet and Haiku. Strong tool use and long-horizon agentic work. LiteLLM: Self-hosted proxy that speaks one API to 100+ providers, with keys and budgets.
Anthropic is a hosted service only. LiteLLM can run on your own infrastructure.
Anthropic is proprietary (usage based). LiteLLM is open source (open source).
Every page here answers to Accept: text/markdown and returns the same content at roughly a tenth the tokens. No separate site, no toggle — same URL.
curl -s -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://newagent.build/compare/anthropic-vs-litellm