ngrok AI Gateway vs Velane: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of ngrok AI Gateway and Velane — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
ngrok AI Gateway
ngrok
Unified LLM gateway that routes any SDK to public providers, custom endpoints, and self-hosted models behind one URL and one key.
Key features
- Unified gateway: one URL and one key routes to public LLM providers, custom endpoints, and self-hosted models.
- Drop-in SDKs: swap baseURL to gateway.ngrok.ai and your existing OpenAI / Anthropic / Vercel AI SDK code keeps working.
- Model fallback: specify a primary model plus fallbacks in one call to route through backups when providers fail or throttle.
- Local LLM access: reach self-hosted models over private connectivity without public IPs or inbound ports.
- Bring your own keys: drop in the provider keys you already pay for and route through them at your current rates.
- Access control: manage which apps, users, and keys can hit which models from one place.
- Observability: monitor usage, cost, and traffic across every model and provider in the gateway.
Best for
- AI engineering team standardizes on one base URL so app code no longer needs per-provider integrations.
- Platform team routes production traffic to a self-hosted model with automatic fallback to a public provider on failure.
- Startup consolidates OpenAI, Anthropic, and custom keys behind a single gateway for auditing and cost tracking.
- Enterprise governs which teams and services can call which models via central access controls.
- ML team exposes a local LLM cluster to app teams without opening inbound network ports.
- FinOps lead centralizes LLM spend visibility across projects instead of pulling per-provider dashboards.
Velane
Velane
Open-source integration infrastructure for AI agents — 800+ OAuth-connected APIs, sandboxed runtimes, and dev/staging/prod promotion via MCP.
Key features
- 800+ OAuth Integrations: One connection lets agents call Salesforce, Stripe, Slack, HubSpot, Notion, GitHub, Linear, Zendesk and hundreds more via the Nango catalog.
- MCP-Native Interface: Agents connect to mcp.velane.sh and drive discovery, code generation, execution, and deployment through a single MCP server.
- Bun & Python Sandboxes: Every invocation runs in an isolated ephemeral runtime, so agent code can be tested safely without touching production state.
- Dev / Staging / Prod Environments: Promote workflows through three environments with agent-issued publish_snippet calls and stable versioned HTTP endpoints.
- Shared Credential Store: One OAuth connection per provider is reused across every team member's agent — no secret ever appears in code.
- Invocation Logs & Audit Trail: Per-tenant execution logs let agents call get_logs to debug failures and give teams a full audit history.
- Role-Based Access: Invoke, manage, and admin scopes control what each teammate's agent is allowed to do.
- Self-Host or Hosted: Run Velane on your own infrastructure under AGPL-3.0 or use the managed mcp.velane.sh endpoint.
Best for
- Agent-Built Stripe→HubSpot Automations: An agent in Cursor writes a Bun workflow that reads Stripe customers and pushes them into HubSpot, tests it in dev, and promotes to prod in one conversation.
- Solo Developer Shipping SaaS Integrations: A single developer wires up Slack, Notion, and GitHub actions without maintaining an OAuth backend.
- Multi-Tenant B2B Agent Products: A team runs Velane per tenant so each customer's agent has isolated credentials, sandboxes, and audit logs.
- Safe Refactors of Live Workflows: Deploy a new version of a workflow to staging, verify with logs, then roll to prod with instant rollback.
- MCP-First Prototyping: Prototype an entire integration pipeline from an IDE chat without spinning up backend infrastructure.