plano vs router
AI-native Envoy-based proxy for agentic apps: agent orchestration via a 4B routing model, smart LLM routing, guardrail filter chains and zero-code OTEL traces. Rust, framework-agnostic. — versus — Weave's Go model router: drop-in proxy speaking Anthropic, OpenAI and Gemini APIs that scores each request with an on-box ONNX embedder (Avengers-Pro clusters) and routes to the cheapest fit model.
Both are AI-native proxies doing smart per-request model routing; plano is Envoy-based with a 4B routing model, weave uses a tiny ONNX embedder in-process for sub-50ms decisions.
| plano | router | |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 7.0k | 4.2k |
| Forks | 486 | 116 |
| Language | Rust | Go |
| License | Apache-2.0 | NOASSERTION |
| Last activity | 23 days ago | yesterday |
| Topics | gateway, orchestration | gateway |
| Curated connections | 8 | 5 |
plano — the curator's take
Reach for it when multi-agent code is drowning in hidden middleware — intent routing, provider quirks, guardrail hooks, tracing glue. Plano moves all of that out-of-process: agents are plain OpenAI-compatible HTTP servers in any language, orchestration is YAML plus a purpose-built 4B router model. NOT for a quick single-agent demo (it adds an infra hop and Envoy operational surface), and note the catch: the hosted Plano-Orchestrator LLM is free-tier only — production means running the routing models yourself or getting API keys. If you only need provider unification, LiteLLM is lighter.
router — the curator's take
Choose it when the goal is *smart* routing, not just multi-provider fan-out: an in-process embedder classifies each action and picks a model per request in under 50ms, with a `/v1/route` endpoint to inspect the decision and OTLP traces out of the box. `npx @weave-os/router` wires Claude Code, Codex, opencode or pi in one step; self-hosting needs Postgres (and Pub/Sub for multi-replica). Don't reach for it if you want a plain gateway (litellm), free-tier pooling (omniroute), or to route through subscription CLIs (cliproxyapi) — and note the Elastic License v2, which is not OSI open source, and that the frictionless quickstart is the hosted service.