ARBR vs CleanSlop: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of ARBR and CleanSlop — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
ARBR
Gyde & Domkundwar Foundation
Open-source, MIT-licensed AI gateway and control plane that routes, governs and observes every LLM request behind one OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
Key features
- OpenAI-Compatible Routing: A single drop-in endpoint over every major provider, with rules, difficulty-aware selection, cost guardrails and automatic fallback choosing the model per request.
- In-Path Governance: Budgets, rate limits, output guardrails, prompt-injection checks and kill switches enforce policy before inference rather than auditing it afterwards.
- Structured Observability: Cost, latency, tokens and routing decisions are emitted as structured events attributed by application, team, model and user, viewable in local dashboards or exported to OpenTelemetry backends such as Datadog, Grafana and Prometheus.
- LLM-Judge Evaluation: A sample of live traffic is scored for quality so requests can be routed to the cheapest model that provably clears the bar, rather than optimising on price alone.
- Safe Model Deployment: Canary and shadow new models against real traffic with regression gates that block promotion until evaluations pass, plus instant rollback.
- Broad Provider Coverage: One layer over Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, Amazon Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, Vertex AI, Groq, DeepSeek, Moonshot, xAI and Mistral, plus LiteLLM and NVIDIA NIM, with pricing and benchmark data for over 3,000 models.
- Drop-In SDK Compatibility: Change only the base URL and existing OpenAI SDKs, agent frameworks and chat UIs keep working, gaining streaming chat completions, embeddings, a realtime voice proxy and JavaScript and Python SDKs.
- Self-Hosted and MIT Licensed: The full control plane runs inside your own infrastructure under an MIT licence, with a hosted option available for teams that do not want to operate it.
Best for
- LLM Cost Reduction: Route summarisation and extraction traffic to cheap small models while reserving frontier models for analysis, cutting spend without hand-editing every call site.
- AI Spend Attribution: Give finance and engineering a per-application, per-team and per-user breakdown of token spend so AI budgets can be owned by the groups that generate them.
- Enterprise AI Governance: Enforce departmental budgets, rate limits and kill switches in the request path so a runaway agent cannot exhaust a quarter's inference budget.
- Provider Risk Mitigation: Keep applications provider-neutral behind one endpoint with automatic fallback, so a single vendor outage or price change does not require a code change.
- Model Migration Testing: Shadow or canary a newly released model against production traffic and let regression gates decide whether it is promoted.
- Prompt-Injection Defence: Apply output guardrails and prompt-injection checks centrally for every application instead of reimplementing them per service.
CleanSlop
CleanSlop
Scans vibe-coded apps for launch-blocking issues like leaked keys and data exposure, and reports what to fix first, right from your coding agent.
Key features
- Agent-Native Scanning: Tell Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or other agents to scan with CleanSlop and fix findings where you build.
- System-Level Code Mapping: Maps routes, background jobs, data and external services so each finding follows a real call path.
- Prioritized Reports: Findings grouped as needs attention, worth a look and minor, worst first.
- Evidence for Every Finding: Shows where each issue lives in your code and why it was flagged.
- Plain-English Fixes: Explains what is wrong, why it matters and what to do about it.
- Copy for LLM: Hands any report to your AI tool so it can apply the fixes.
- GitHub App Integration: Scan only the repositories you select, read-only access.
- Expert Triage Calls: Book a 15-minute call with a CleanSlop engineer to walk through findings.
Best for
- A solo founder checks a Next.js and Supabase app built with an AI coding assistant before launching.
- A developer discovers an exposed AI API key bundled into browser code and moves it to a server route.
- A side-project builder verifies that one user's data cannot be read by another through database policies.
- A Claude Code user runs a scan from the terminal and has the agent fix the top findings.
- A team lead gets a short prioritized list instead of hundreds of linter warnings.
- An indie hacker books an expert triage call to confirm an ambiguous finding.