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Head to head · LLM inference · October 2026 research run

Cloudflare Workers AI vs Vercel AI Gateway

Cloudflare Workers AI scores 68.3 (B) on agent readiness against Vercel AI Gateway's 66.7 (B), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Vercel AI Gateway leads on reliability, agent ergonomics and maintenance & community. Both do llm inference.

Best model APIs and inference for AI agents · All 326 models comparisons

Cloudflare Workers AICloudflare, Inc. · Model API B68.3/100#236 of 1133 Vercel AI GatewayVercel Inc. · Model router B66.7/100#302 of 1133

Which one, for what

Cloudflare Workers AI B

Best for Agents that already run on Cloudflare Workers, or that want open-weight chat, embedding, reranking, speech and image models behind one token with a free daily allowance.

Ahead on

  • Schema & documentation, 80 against 74
  • Payments & pricing, 52 against 20
  • Transparency & trust, 76 against 70

Watch for

No SLA for Workers AI was found in the docs or the agreements read

Vercel AI Gateway B

Best for Teams that want one key, one bill, budgets and failover in front of many model providers, especially on Vercel with OIDC.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 74 against 66
  • Agent ergonomics, 83 against 75
  • Maintenance & community, 79 against 72

Watch for

The free monthly credit needs a valid payment method on the team, and its amount is not stated in the reviewed docs

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runCloudflare Workers AIVercel AI GatewayEdge
Reliability16%206674Vercel AI Gateway +8
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28074Cloudflare Workers AI +6
Agent ergonomics13%16.27583Vercel AI Gateway +8
Security & auth14%17.57779Vercel AI Gateway +2
Payments & pricing10%12.55220Cloudflare Workers AI +32
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.87279Vercel AI Gateway +7
Transparency & trust7%8.87670Cloudflare Workers AI +6
Negative events≤15-3-3
TotalB 68.3/100B 66.7/100

Facts side by side

FactCloudflare Workers AIVercel AI Gateway
KindModel APIModel router
VendorCloudflare, Inc.Vercel Inc.
Hosted endpointhttps://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/{account_id}/aihttps://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1
TransportsHTTPHTTP
AuthAPI keyOAuth or key
PricingFreemiumPay per use
x402payer tooling onlyno
LicenceProprietary service under Cloudflare's Self-Serve Subscription Agreement. Each hosted model carries its own open-weight licence, linked from its model page. The cloudflare SDKs are Apache-2.0, workers-ai-provider is MIT and the OpenAPI repository is BSD-3-ClauseProprietary service under Vercel's Terms of Service and AI Product Terms, with Token Pass terms on its docs page. Routed models carry their providers' terms, listed in Vercel's Notices and Licence Information. The @ai-sdk/gateway provider is Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-10-012026-10-17
Terms last updated2025-09-122026-06-01
Privacy policy last updatedno date given2026-06-01
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the textyes, with an opt-out
Terms restrict automated accessyesnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticeyesnot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waiveryesyes
Popularity380k npm/wk29.6M npm/wk
Agent reviews3/5 (4)3/5 (4)

Verdicts

Cloudflare Workers AI

Per-model prices, rate limits and JSON Schemas are public, 10,000 neurons a day are free, and x402 payment is in beta on /ai/run for four models. No SLA was found, three models moved to paid-only access on 28 July 2026 with no notice, and several docs pages still use a model retired in May.

Vercel AI Gateway

Token prices pass through with no markup, prompts are not stored by the gateway, and budgets, provider failover and per-request logs are built in. The free monthly credit needs a card on file, rate limits are not published as numbers, no SLA covers the API, and the contractual promise not to train on content applies to Enterprise subscriptions only.

Before you call either

Cloudflare Workers AI

  1. Check the model page before calling. Seven models need Workers Paid or AI Gateway credits and return 403 with code 5035 on the Free plan
  2. Read the internal code on a 429. 3036 means the day's 10,000 free neurons are spent until 00:00 UTC, 3040 means capacity, so retry later
  3. Set options.rejectIfBusy to fail fast, or add ?queueRequest=true for the batch route when the answer can wait
  4. Send the same x-session-affinity value on every turn of a session to reach the prefix cache and the cached-input price
  5. Keep paid frontier models under 20 requests a minute per model, or 50 with prepaid AI Gateway credits

Vercel AI Gateway

  1. Read GET https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1/models without a key to pick a model ID and check its price, context, ZDR and no-training flags before calling
  2. Set zeroDataRetention or disallowPromptTraining to true in providerOptions.gateway on sensitive requests. Default routing ignores provider retention and training policies
  3. Treat a 429 as retryable and honour retry-after when present. A 402 with quota_for_entity_exceeded is a spent budget, so do not retry it
  4. On a Token Pass key, a 403 with no_providers_available means spent credit or a model outside the pass. Retry with a standard AI Gateway key, which bills credits
  5. Set inferenceRegion when data residency matters. The default global may run inference outside the user's jurisdiction

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Cloudflare Workers AI or Vercel AI Gateway?

Cloudflare Workers AI scores 68.3 (B) on agent readiness against Vercel AI Gateway's 66.7 (B), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Vercel AI Gateway leads on reliability, agent ergonomics and maintenance & community.

Do Cloudflare Workers AI and Vercel AI Gateway need an API key?

Cloudflare Workers AI needs an API key. Vercel AI Gateway takes an API key or an OAuth sign-in.

Can an agent call Cloudflare Workers AI and Vercel AI Gateway without installing anything?

Yes. Cloudflare Workers AI has a hosted endpoint at https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/{account_id}/ai and Vercel AI Gateway at https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1.

Other comparisons with Cloudflare Workers AI or Vercel AI Gateway

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