Claude Code Router lets you run one local control plane in front of Claude Code and other AI coding agents — routing requests across different models and providers, layering in new capabilities, and orchestrating tools while keeping full control over cost and behavior. MIT-licensed, open source, 36,000+ GitHub stars.
Claude Code Router is a local control plane that sits in front of Claude Code and other AI coding agents. Instead of the agent talking directly to one provider, requests pass through the router, which decides where each one goes. That lets you send different work to different models and providers, add capabilities the agent did not ship with, and orchestrate tools from one place. It runs on your own machine, so the routing rules, the keys and the traffic stay local. The practical result is control over cost and behavior: cheap models for mechanical work, stronger ones for reasoning, a local model when nothing should leave the machine, all without changing how you use the agent itself. It is MIT licensed and open source. Expect a configuration file and some experimentation to find rules that fit your work, rather than a setting you flip once.
Two situations justify the setup. The first is cost. If you spend heavily on an agent and notice much of that spend is routine editing, file reading and boilerplate, routing those calls to a cheaper model while reserving the expensive one for actual reasoning is a direct saving with a configuration file as the only work. The second is control. If some code cannot leave your machine, a router lets you keep those requests on a local model while everything else uses hosted providers. It also helps if you want to try a new provider without rebuilding your workflow. It is not worth it if you use one model, the bills are fine, and you would rather not maintain another moving part in your toolchain.
Claude Mem addresses a different limit on the same agent, carrying context across sessions rather than deciding which model handles a request. They stack cleanly and solve unrelated problems. OpenHands is an alternative at the agent layer rather than a layer beneath one, a full open source coding agent you would use instead of the agent you are routing. Open WebUI gets you multi provider access through a chat interface, which is the better choice when you want to talk to different models yourself, while this router is for an agent making calls programmatically inside your development loop. Pick Claude Code Router when the agent stays and only its traffic should change.
Compare with: Claude Mem, OpenHands, Open WebUI
The catalog records this as free, and the project is MIT licensed. You run it yourself, so there is no service fee, and on a development machine the resource footprint is small. The point of the tool is to reduce a cost rather than add one. You still pay every provider you route to under its own terms, and you still need keys for each. If you route to a local model, the cost becomes hardware and power instead. Budget for the providers, not for the router.
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