What LLM API should I use for my app?

It depends on your app’s needs, but here’s a practical way to choose.

Quick recommendation

• Best general-purpose default: OpenAI API
  • Strong quality, broad model options, good tool/function calling, and solid docs.
• Best if you want cheaper / fast at scale: Anthropic Claude or Google Gemini
  • Depends on your workload, but both can be cost-effective for certain tasks.
• Best if you need open-source / self-hosting: Llama-based APIs
  • Good if privacy, control, or custom deployment matters more than simplicity.

How to choose

Use OpenAI if you need:

• High-quality text generation and reasoning
• Reliable structured outputs / function calling
• Multimodal features
• A straightforward developer experience

Use Anthropic if you need:

• Strong long-context performance
• Excellent writing and analysis quality
• Safer behavior for assistant-style apps

Use Google Gemini if you need:

• Tight integration with Google ecosystem
• Multimodal workflows
• Competitive pricing and large context options

Use open-source/self-hosted if you need:

• Data control / on-prem deployment
• Lower marginal cost at high volume
• The ability to fine-tune or customize deeply

A simple decision rule

• Building a startup MVP? Start with OpenAI
• Enterprise with strict privacy/compliance? Consider self-hosted or private cloud
• Need long documents / research workflows? Look at Claude or Gemini
• Need lowest cost at scale? Benchmark multiple providers with your actual prompts

Best practice

Don’t choose based on model name alone—test these on:

1. Your real prompts
2. Your target latency
3. Your cost per successful task
4. Output quality and failure rate

My default advice

If you want one API to start with, use OpenAI first, then benchmark against Anthropic and Gemini once you have real traffic.

If you want, I can help you pick the best API for your specific app if you tell me:

• what the app does
• expected traffic
• budget
• whether you need vision, audio, tools, or long context