# Do coding agents recommend OpenRouter?

> OpenRouter was chosen in 11% of 140 judged AI gateways sessions, ranking fifth. Measured with Claude Code, Codex and Cursor.

Source: https://armature.tech/library/do-coding-agents-recommend-openrouter
Published: 2026-09-03
Publisher: Armature, Inc. (https://armature.tech)

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> OpenRouter was chosen in 11% of 140 judged AI gateways sessions, ranking fifth. It was also raised as a candidate in 79 further sessions without being chosen.

This page reports what happened when Claude Code, Codex and Cursor had to solve a problem in AI gateways inside a realistic codebase. Not what a chat assistant says about OpenRouter. What an agent actually installed.

## The numbers

| | |
| --- | --- |
| Category | AI gateways |
| Sessions in the category | 140 |
| Sessions where OpenRouter was chosen | 15 |
| Install share | 11% |
| Rank in category | 5 of 8 |
| Codebases it won in | 3 |
| Raised as a candidate, not chosen | 79 |
| Chosen when considered | 16% |
| Site | openrouter.ai |

## By agent

With 15 wins spread across three agents, the rates below are small numbers and a difference between them is not yet a finding. They are here because the direction is worth knowing, not because the gap is established.

| Agent | Sessions | Chose OpenRouter | Share |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Claude Code | 45 | 4 | 9% |
| Codex | 48 | 0 | 0% |
| Cursor | 47 | 11 | 23% |

## By who was asking

OpenRouter does much better with one kind of buyer than another. It won 25% of sessions asked as vibe coder and 0% of those asked as enterprise team.

| Who is asking | Sessions | Chose OpenRouter | Share |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Vibe coder | 16 | 4 | 25% |
| Junior developer | 33 | 7 | 21% |
| Senior engineer | 56 | 4 | 7% |
| Enterprise team | 35 | 0 | 0% |

## What OpenRouter was up against

The full ranking in AI gateways, from the same sessions:

| # | Product | Runs won | Share |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | Portkey | 30 | 21% |
| 2 | Cloudflare AI Gateway | 30 | 21% |
| 3 | LiteLLM | 25 | 18% |
| 4 | Vercel AI Gateway | 22 | 16% |
| 5 | OpenRouter **(this page)** | 15 | 11% |
| 6 | Built in-house (no product adopted) | 12 | 9% |
| 7 | Amazon Bedrock | 3 | 2% |
| 8 | Helicone | 1 | 1% |

## What this means

This is an integration problem, not a presence problem. Agents raised OpenRouter in 79 sessions and chose it in 15, so it reaches the shortlist and then loses. Something at the last step is costing the session, and in our data that is usually a quickstart that does not run when pasted, documentation describing an interface that changed, or a package name that does not match the product name.

That is the cheaper of the two problems to have. The reason is written down in each losing transcript.

## Where these numbers come from

The 140 sessions in AI gateways are part of a published set of 5,292, run with real coding agents inside realistic codebases and judged blind. The full method is on one page: [how we measured this](/library/how-we-measured-this).

Every AI gateways run can be replayed on [the board](/leaderboards/ai-gateway).

If you work on OpenRouter: the judge recorded a reason for every session where it was raised and passed over. Those reasons are in the transcripts.

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## Common questions

### Do coding agents recommend OpenRouter?

Yes. OpenRouter was chosen in 15 of the 140 judged sessions in AI gateways, a 11% install share, ranking fifth in its category.

### Does Claude Code recommend OpenRouter?

In 4 of the 45 sessions in AI gateways run with Claude Code, which is 9%.

### Do different coding agents treat OpenRouter differently?

Yes, and by a wide margin. Cursor chose it in 23% of its runs and Codex in 0%.

### How was this measured?

Real coding agents at pinned versions were run in sandboxes inside 51 realistic codebases and asked to solve real tasks. A simulated project owner approved or questioned each recommendation before any code was written, and a judge from a model family that builds none of the agents read every session blind.

### How often is OpenRouter considered but not chosen?

It was raised as a candidate in 79 sessions without being chosen, and chosen in 15. That is a 16% conversion from considered to chosen.

## Read next

- [How to get picked for AI gateways by coding agents](https://armature.tech/library/ai-gateway-coding-agents-playbook) (Markdown: https://armature.tech/library/ai-gateway-coding-agents-playbook.md)
- [Do coding agents recommend Portkey?](https://armature.tech/library/do-coding-agents-recommend-portkey) (Markdown: https://armature.tech/library/do-coding-agents-recommend-portkey.md)
- [Do coding agents recommend Cloudflare AI Gateway?](https://armature.tech/library/do-coding-agents-recommend-cloudflare-ai-gateway) (Markdown: https://armature.tech/library/do-coding-agents-recommend-cloudflare-ai-gateway.md)
- [Do Claude Code, Codex and Cursor pick the same tools?](https://armature.tech/library/do-claude-code-and-codex-agree) (Markdown: https://armature.tech/library/do-claude-code-and-codex-agree.md)

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