Model Router Benchmarks

Model routers promise to send easy requests to cheap models and hard ones to strong models, but until now there was little shared data for comparing them. OpenRouter's new benchmark page scores seven routers, including NVIDIA Switchyard and Unbiased Pareto, on quality, speed and cost across six benchmarks, and rolls the results into a blended Router Index. The page also offers views on which models each router selects and how reliable it is. The accompanying post is candid about the weak spots. Switching models mid-conversation forces prompt caches to rebuild, the signals routers use to judge task complexity are often weak, and the routing decision itself adds latency. Any of these can erase the savings a router was meant to produce. For engineers deciding between a router and a fixed model, this turns a vendor claim into something testable: compare a router's index position against simply running the best single model for the workload, with cache behavior counted.