A managed, EU-hosted alternative to LiteLLM
LiteLLM is an excellent open-source gateway — if you want to run one yourself. 2kw.ai is for teams that want the same OpenAI-compatible routing as a managed EU service, with document extraction and cost observability built in instead of bolted on.
Who should pick which?
2kw.ai vs LiteLLM at a glance
| 2kw.ai | LiteLLM | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Managed AI platform: gateway, document extraction, observability | Open-source LLM gateway and Python SDK you self-host |
| Pricing | €99–€499/mo flat tiers, 7-day free trial | $0 open source; Enterprise on request |
| Hosting & operations | Fully managed, EU-hosted | Self-hosted — you deploy, upgrade, scale, and monitor it |
| OpenAI-compatible API | ✓ | ✓ |
| Provider coverage | OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, Google Vertex AI, self-hosted via Ollama | 100+ provider integrations |
| Document extraction | ✓ Schema-driven, 20+ input formats | — |
| Audio transcription | ✓ | — |
| Extraction quality | ✓ Grounding scores per extracted field | — |
| Cost tracking | ✓ Per token, per euro, per field; budgets and alerts | ✓ Spend tracking, budgets, virtual keys |
| Observability | ✓ Built-in dashboard: spend, operations, quality, latency | Via integrations (Langfuse, OpenTelemetry, …) |
| EU data residency / GDPR | ✓ Built-in models EU-hosted, GDPR-compliant | Depends on where and how you deploy it |
| Support | Included on paid tiers | Community; 24/7 support with Enterprise |
Comparison as of July 22, 2026. LiteLLM details from litellm.ai — check there for current information.
The real cost of a $0 gateway
LiteLLM's open-source tier genuinely costs nothing to license — but a gateway is production infrastructure on your hottest path. Someone on your team deploys it, sizes it, upgrades it every time a provider changes an API, watches its memory, and answers the page when it falls over at 2 a.m. That someone is usually your most senior engineer, and their time is the actual price.
2kw.ai runs the gateway for you. You point your OpenAI SDK at a new base URL, pick models per workload in config, and provider churn becomes our operations problem instead of your sprint interruption.
More than routing
A gateway moves requests; it doesn't answer what teams actually build most often — turning documents into structured data. 2kw.ai ships schema-driven extraction across 20+ formats, audio transcription, and grounding scores that link every extracted value back to its source, on the same platform and the same bill as the gateway. With LiteLLM you'd assemble that pipeline yourself from separate tools.
EU residency without a deployment project
Self-hosting LiteLLM inside the EU does give you data locality — you're building and operating that guarantee yourself. 2kw.ai's built-in models are EU-hosted and GDPR-compliant out of the box, operated by Manfred Kunze Development GmbH in Germany, with an audit trail for every request. Bring your own provider keys on Scale and Enterprise when a workload calls for it — the data-flow trade-off stays explicit and per-workload.
Common questions
The open-source gateway is free to license, and that's a real strength. The costs that remain are infrastructure and the engineering time to operate it; SSO, audit logs, and 24/7 support sit in LiteLLM's paid Enterprise offering.
Both expose an OpenAI-compatible API, so applications typically switch by changing the base URL and API key. Model routing moves from your LiteLLM config into 2kw.ai's dashboard or API.
Yes — route to self-hosted models via Ollama alongside the frontier providers, from the same endpoint.
How this comparison was made
2kw.ai is our product, so read this page as a vendor comparison. LiteLLM facts were taken from litellm.ai on July 22, 2026; if something is outdated or wrong, tell us and we'll fix it.