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Head to head · LLM inference · October 2026 research run

Cloudflare AI Gateway vs Muse Spark Open

Cloudflare AI Gateway scores 66.8 (B) on agent readiness against Muse Spark Open's 53.4 (D), and leads in every scored category. Both do llm inference.

Best model APIs and inference for AI agents · All 210 models comparisons

Cloudflare AI GatewayCloudflare, Inc. · Model router B66.8/100#293 of 1095 Muse Spark OpenMeta · Model API D53.4/100#760 of 1095

Which one, for what

Cloudflare AI Gateway B

Best for Teams that already hold a Cloudflare account and want one token, one bill, logs, budgets and fallbacks in front of several model providers, or that want to keep their own provider keys behind a proxy with spend limits.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 66 against 42
  • Schema & documentation, 75 against 61
  • Security & auth, 75 against 44
  • Maintenance & community, 75 against 60
  • Transparency & trust, 73 against 53

Also in its favour

  • A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install

Watch for

API tokens are account-scoped. Any token with AI Gateway Run can send requests through every gateway in the account and spend its stored provider keys

Muse Spark Open D

Best for A team with a four-GPU Blackwell node, or two to four Mac Studios, that wants a 1M-token multimodal coding and agent model on its own hardware with no prompts leaving it.

Also in its favour

  • No key needed to call it
  • No incidents deducted, where Cloudflare AI Gateway loses 3 points for them

Watch for

The NVFP4 checkpoint (about 537 GB) serves on four B300 GPUs and the BF16 one (about 1.65 TB) on eight

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runCloudflare AI GatewayMuse Spark OpenEdge
Reliability16%206642Cloudflare AI Gateway +24
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.27561Cloudflare AI Gateway +14
Agent ergonomics13%16.27369Cloudflare AI Gateway +4
Security & auth14%17.57544Cloudflare AI Gateway +31
Payments & pricing10%12.55250Cloudflare AI Gateway +2
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.87560Cloudflare AI Gateway +15
Transparency & trust7%8.87353Cloudflare AI Gateway +20
Negative events≤15-30
TotalB 66.8/100D 53.4/100

Facts side by side

FactCloudflare AI GatewayMuse Spark Open
KindModel routerModel API
VendorCloudflare, Inc.Meta
Hosted endpointhttps://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/{account_id}/aino (local only)
TransportsHTTPHTTP
AuthAPI keyNone
PricingFreemiumFree
x402payer tooling onlyno
LicenceProprietary service under Cloudflare's Self-Serve Subscription Agreement and its service-specific terms. Third-party models carry their providers' terms, linked from each model page. ai-gateway-provider is MIT and Cloudflare's OpenAPI repository is BSD-3-ClauseMuse Model Licence (source-available weights, not an OSI licence), free of charge with an attribution notice, a separate agreement with Meta before Model as a Service by a licensee group above $20M gross revenue, and the Muse Spark Open Usage Policy
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-10-062026-10-15
Terms last updated2025-09-12
Privacy policy last updatedno date givenno document linked
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessyes
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticeyes
Arbitration or class-action waiveryes
Popularity251k npm/wknone

Verdicts

Cloudflare AI Gateway

The gateway layer is free, per-model prices are public with no markup, and logs, spend limits and fallbacks are set per gateway. API tokens cannot be limited to one gateway, the service terms take third-party models outside Cloudflare's DPA, no SLA names the product, and error codes changed on 6 October 2026 with same-day notice.

Muse Spark Open

Muse Spark Open runs on the owner's hardware in seven runtimes, with OpenAI-compatible servers in vLLM and SGLang, standard tool calls, a 1M-token context and Meta's own serving docs. Serving the 537 GB NVFP4 checkpoint takes four B300 GPUs, Meta's download is gated by manual review, and the licence adds attribution and a revenue threshold for model resellers.

Before you call either

Cloudflare AI Gateway

  1. Use the REST API at api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/{account_id}/ai/v1 with a token holding Workers AI Read. A token with only an AI Gateway permission returns 401 with code 10000
  2. Send cf-aig-gateway-id on every Workers AI (@cf/) call and on dynamic routes. Without it a dynamic route resolves against the default gateway and returns 404
  3. Set cf-aig-collect-log: false or cf-aig-collect-log-payload: false on sensitive requests. Logging of prompts and responses is on by default
  4. Treat a 429 as a rate limit or a spent budget and a 401 with code 2009 as a rejected provider key. Do not retry a 2009
  5. Set byok_only on the gateway or send cf-aig-no-wholesale: true to stop a request without a provider key falling through to paid Unified Billing credits

Muse Spark Open

  1. Start vLLM or SGLang with --reasoning-parser muse --tool-call-parser muse (vLLM also --enable-auto-tool-choice), or tool calls come back as raw text
  2. Set reasoning_effort to low or medium for short tasks. The default is xhigh, reasoning can't be turned off, and other values return an error
  3. Stop only on <|eot|> and end of text. Stopping on <|eom|> cuts off tool calls and final answers
  4. Stream long generations and leave max_tokens room for reasoning, or content can come back empty with finish_reason length
  5. Don't call Meta Model API for this model. Use a self-hosted server or a hosted provider's model string, such as meta-models/muse-spark-open

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Cloudflare AI Gateway or Muse Spark Open?

Cloudflare AI Gateway scores 66.8 (B) on agent readiness against Muse Spark Open's 53.4 (D), and leads in every scored category.

Do Cloudflare AI Gateway and Muse Spark Open need an API key?

Cloudflare AI Gateway needs an API key. Muse Spark Open needs no key.

Can an agent call Cloudflare AI Gateway and Muse Spark Open without installing anything?

Cloudflare AI Gateway has a hosted endpoint at https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/{account_id}/ai. No hosted endpoint is listed for Muse Spark Open.

Other comparisons with Cloudflare AI Gateway or Muse Spark Open

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