Get an audit

Head to head · Usage billing · October 2026 research run

Lago vs Orb

Orb and Lago score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 66.5 (B) and 65.7 (B). Lago leads on reliability, payments & pricing and maintenance & community. Both do usage billing.

Best payment and monetisation platforms for AI agents · All 76 platforms comparisons

LagoGet Lago Corp. · HTTP API B65.7/100#311 of 950 OrbOrb, Inc. · HTTP API B66.5/100#289 of 950

Which one, for what

Lago B

Good for A team that wants usage metering, plans, wallets and invoicing under its own control and can run PostgreSQL and Redis.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 86 against 77
  • Payments & pricing, 50 against 5
  • Maintenance & community, 91 against 82

Also in its favour

  • Open source

Watch for

The free edition has one organisation API key with full access. Creating more keys needs a Premium licence and per-resource permissions need an enterprise add-on

Orb B

Good for A software or AI company that bills on usage and needs event metering, plan versioning, prepaid credits, invoicing and revenue reporting behind one API, with Stripe or Adyen collecting the money.

Ahead on

  • Agent ergonomics, 84 against 71
  • Security & auth, 55 against 37
  • Transparency & trust, 65 against 59

Also in its favour

  • A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install
  • No incidents deducted, where Lago loses 3 points for them

Watch for

All three plans (Core, Advanced, Enterprise) show custom pricing only, and the pricing page sends new customers to sales

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLagoOrbEdge
Reliability16%208677Lago +9
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28788Orb +1
Agent ergonomics13%16.27184Orb +13
Security & auth14%17.53755Orb +18
Payments & pricing10%12.5505Lago +45
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.89182Lago +9
Transparency & trust7%8.85965Orb +6
Negative events≤15-30
Total65.7 · B66.5 · B

Facts side by side

FactLagoOrb
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorGet Lago Corp.Orb, Inc.
Hosted endpointno (local only)https://api.withorb.com/v1
TransportsHTTPHTTP
AuthAPI keyAPI key
PricingFreemiumPaid
x402nono
LicenceAGPL-3.0 (platform). The MCP server and agent SDKs are MIT. Premium capabilities and Lago Cloud are commercialProprietary service under Orb's Platform Terms and Conditions. The SDKs on GitHub are Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentedyesno
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-10-072026-10-09
Terms last updatedno document linked2024-11-13
Privacy policy last updatedno document linked2025-05-07
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticenot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivernot found in the text
Popularity11k stars, 48k npm/wk5 stars, 185k npm/wk

Verdicts

Lago

Lago's open-source edition runs usage metering, plans, wallets and invoicing on the owner's servers at no charge, with an OpenAPI 3.1 file of 217 operations and releases about every two weeks. The free edition has one unscoped API key and no audit logs, and Lago's llms.txt understates what its MCP server can change.

Orb

Orb suits a company that bills on usage and wants one API for events, plans, credits and invoices. It publishes an OpenAPI 3.1 file, numeric rate limits, idempotency keys and a dry-run header. Every plan is priced on request and access starts with sales. No scope list for API keys or public sub-processor list was found.

Before you call either

Lago

  1. Call <your Lago API origin>/api/v1 with Authorization: Bearer <key>. On Lago Cloud the hosts are api.getlago.com and api.eu.getlago.com
  2. Send every usage event with a deterministic transaction_id and an explicit timestamp, and resend the same payload on retry. On the ClickHouse event store a changed timestamp is billed again
  3. Expect 422 value_already_exist for a repeated event on the Postgres event store. Treat it as success for a retry
  4. Page with page and per_page and read meta.next_page and meta.total_count. The default page size is 100 in most cases
  5. Treat the free edition's API key as full access. It can void invoices and terminate subscriptions, so keep it out of prompts and ask a person before financial changes
  6. Before giving an assistant the MCP server, note that it includes delete_invoice, void_invoice, delete_plan and create_payment and sets no read-only annotations

Orb

  1. Call https://api.withorb.com/v1 with Authorization: Bearer <key>. A person creates the key in the Orb web app under organisation settings, in test mode or live mode
  2. Send an Idempotency-Key of at most 64 characters on every POST and PATCH. A 409 means the first request is still running or the body changed
  3. Add Dry-Run: True to check a write first, and confirm Orb-Dry-Run: true in the response. Ingest, amend and deprecate event calls ignore it and run for real
  4. Do not send Idempotency-Key with Dry-Run. Orb returns a validation error
  5. Page with limit (default 20, maximum 100) and pass next_cursor back as cursor while has_more is true
  6. Back off exponentially on 429. Test mode allows 5 writes a second and 2,000 ingested events a minute

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Lago or Orb?

Orb and Lago score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 66.5 (B) and 65.7 (B). Lago leads on reliability, payments & pricing and maintenance & community.

Do Lago and Orb need an API key?

Both need an API key.

Can an agent call Lago and Orb without installing anything?

No hosted endpoint is listed for Lago. Orb has a hosted endpoint at https://api.withorb.com/v1.

Are Lago and Orb open source?

Lago is open source (AGPL-3.0 (platform). The MCP server and agent SDKs are MIT. Premium capabilities and Lago Cloud are commercial). No open-source release is listed for Orb.

Other comparisons with Lago or Orb

Machine-readable

For companies

Do agents find, use and choose your tools?

An agent-readiness audit runs our probes, task suite and eight reviewer agents against your public and internal tools, and comes back with a scorecard, the transcripts of what failed, and a fix list in priority order. From $2,500, re-run included. We never take payment to move a rank. We do help companies earn one.

Get an auditSee a sample report