Cross-source synthesis
Synthesized from postmortems, vendor retros, dev-team blogs, and our own builds. Decision-grade evidence ; no marketing voice, no re-summarised vendor copy.
Read the methodologyMay 23, 2026 · Plandex
Plandex's October 2025 cloud shutdown makes self-hosted or local deployment the only path for new evaluations. HN community threads and changelogs show: branching conversation history as the differentiator vs. aider, TUI friction at launch, Ollama support added in v2.2.0, and self-host-only status confirmed.
May 14, 2026 · Mistral API
Mistral AI is a Paris-based lab producing frontier language models with a focus on efficiency and European data sovereignty. Its API follows the OpenAI SDK format, and Mistral models are widely availa
May 14, 2026 · Together AI
Together AI is a cloud inference provider focused on open-source models: Llama, DeepSeek, Mistral, Qwen, and dozens more. It offers serverless pay-per-token pricing, dedicated GPU deployments, and fin
May 14, 2026 · OpenRouter
OpenRouter is a routing layer that provides a single API endpoint and unified billing for 290+ models from every major provider: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Mistral, and dozens of open-source opt
May 14, 2026 · Vercel AI Gateway
Vercel AI Gateway is a model routing and observability layer built into the Vercel platform. It provides access to hundreds of models from a single endpoint, with no markup on token prices, fallback r
May 14, 2026 · Portkey
Portkey is a production AI gateway that handles routing, observability, and guardrails for LLM traffic. It supports 250+ models across providers and sits between application code and the model APIs, p
May 14, 2026 · Cursor
Cursor is an AI-native IDE built as a fork of VS Code. It ships with AI features baked into the editor layer: inline completions (via the Supermaven autocomplete engine), a chat sidebar for codebase Q
May 14, 2026 · Aider
Aider is an open-source AI pair programmer for the terminal. Every edit it makes is a git commit: you always have a clean diff, a reviewable history, and a one-command rollback. There is no subscripti
May 14, 2026 · Qdrant
Qdrant is an open-source vector search engine written in Rust. It runs anywhere: your laptop, a single cloud VM, a Kubernetes cluster, or Qdrant Cloud (managed). The MIT license means no per-seat fees
May 14, 2026 · LangChain
LangChain is an open-source orchestration framework for building LLM applications in Python and JavaScript. It provides abstractions for chains, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agents -- plu
May 14, 2026 · Mastra
Mastra is a TypeScript-native AI framework for building agents, workflows, and RAG pipelines. It is built by the team behind Gatsby and raised $36M by early 2026. The core library is open-source; Mast
May 14, 2026 · Helicone
Helicone is an open-source LLM observability platform that works as a proxy: you change your base URL to route through Helicone, and it captures every request and response automatically. No SDK wrappi
May 14, 2026 · Ollama
Ollama is an open-source runtime for downloading and running large language models locally. It wraps llama.cpp inference behind a simple CLI and a REST API that follows the OpenAI format, abstracting
May 14, 2026 · Continue
Continue is an open-source AI code assistant that runs as an extension in VS Code and JetBrains IDEs. It has 2.5 million VS Code Marketplace installs and 32,400 GitHub stars as of May 2026. The extens
May 14, 2026 · CrewAI
CrewAI is an open-source multi-agent orchestration framework with 47,800 GitHub stars as of April 2026. It powered approximately 2 billion agentic task executions in the 12 months prior to January 202
May 14, 2026 · OpenAI API
The OpenAI API provides pay-per-token access to the GPT-5 model family. It is the reference endpoint that most AI tooling is built to be compatible with -- the OpenAI SDK and its base URL / API key pa
May 14, 2026 · Fireworks AI
Fireworks AI is an inference provider focused on speed and cost for open-source models. It offers serverless pay-per-token pricing, dedicated on-demand GPU instances, and a batch inference mode -- all
May 14, 2026 · Pinecone
Pinecone is a managed vector database designed for production AI applications. As of Q1 2026, it is serverless-only: pod-based indexes are legacy, and all new indexes run on the serverless architectur
May 14, 2026 · Groq
Groq is an inference API that runs open-source LLMs on Language Processing Units (LPUs), purpose-built silicon for sequential token generation. The architecture eliminates the memory-bandwidth bottlen
May 14, 2026 · Langfuse
Langfuse is an open-source LLM engineering platform covering observability, prompt management, evaluations, and cost tracking in a single product. It integrates with LangChain, LiteLLM, the OpenAI SDK