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LLM Provider Ecosystem

Claif Knollm supports 40+ LLM providers, giving you unprecedented choice and flexibility in your AI applications. This comprehensive guide covers everything from premium services to free alternatives.

Provider Categories

Provider Overview

Premium Tier (Enterprise-Grade)

The highest quality models with the best capabilities:

Provider Models Specialty Avg Cost/1K Context
OpenAI 25+ GPT-4, o1, DALL-E $0.015 128K
Anthropic 12+ Claude 3.5, Constitutional AI $0.015 200K
Google 15+ Gemini 1.5, Gemma $0.001 2M
Mistral 12+ European AI, Code $0.007 32K

Fast & Budget Tier

Optimized for speed and cost efficiency:

Provider Models Specialty Avg Cost/1K Speed
Groq 20+ Ultra-fast inference $0.0002 500+ tok/s
Cerebras 8+ High-speed processing $0.0006 300+ tok/s
DeepSeek 15+ Code generation $0.0014 200+ tok/s
Together AI 50+ Open model hosting $0.0008 150+ tok/s

Open Source & Free Tier

Community models and free access:

Provider Models Specialty Cost Access
Hugging Face 100+ Open models Free* API + Transformers
Replicate 80+ Community models Pay-per-use Web + API
Ollama 50+ Local inference Free Local only
HuggingChat 20+ Chat interface Free Web + API

*Free tier with limits, paid plans available.

Key Provider Features

Universal Coverage

Knollm provides unified access to providers offering:

  • Text Generation - All providers
  • Chat Completion - 38 providers
  • Function Calling - 25 providers
  • Vision/Multimodal - 18 providers
  • Code Generation - 30 providers
  • Embeddings - 22 providers
  • Image Generation - 12 providers

Intelligent Routing

Automatic provider selection based on:

graph TD
    A[Request] --> B{Routing Strategy}
    B -->|Cost Optimized| C[Find Cheapest]
    B -->|Quality Optimized| D[Find Best Model]
    B -->|Speed Optimized| E[Find Fastest]
    B -->|Balanced| F[Optimize All Factors]

    C --> G[Provider Selection]
    D --> G
    E --> G
    F --> G

    G --> H{Primary Available?}
    H -->|Yes| I[Use Primary]
    H -->|No| J[Try Fallback]
    J --> K{Fallback Available?}
    K -->|Yes| I
    K -->|No| L[Return Error]

Real-Time Failover

Built-in redundancy ensures reliability:

  • Health Monitoring - Continuous provider health checks
  • Automatic Failover - Seamless switching to backup providers
  • Load Balancing - Distribute requests across healthy providers
  • Circuit Breakers - Temporary exclusion of failing providers

Provider Selection Guide

Choose by Use Case

Recommended: Groq, DeepSeek, Hugging Face

from claif_knollm import KnollmClient, RoutingStrategy

client = KnollmClient(
    routing_strategy=RoutingStrategy.COST_OPTIMIZED,
    fallback_providers=["groq", "deepseek", "huggingface"]
)

Why: Minimal costs, fast iteration, good for experimentation.

Recommended: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google

client = KnollmClient(
    routing_strategy=RoutingStrategy.QUALITY_OPTIMIZED,
    fallback_providers=["openai", "anthropic", "google"]
)

Why: Highest quality, reliable service, comprehensive capabilities.

Recommended: Groq, Cerebras, Together AI

client = KnollmClient(
    routing_strategy=RoutingStrategy.SPEED_OPTIMIZED,
    fallback_providers=["groq", "cerebras", "together"]
)

Why: Ultra-fast processing, cost-effective at scale.

Code: DeepSeek, CodeLlama models Vision: GPT-4 Vision, Claude 3.5 Sonnet Reasoning: o1 models, Claude 3.5 Sonnet Long Context: Google Gemini (2M tokens), Claude (200K tokens)

Choose by Budget

Budget Level Recommended Providers Average Cost/1K Tokens
Free Hugging Face, Ollama $0.0000
Budget (\(0-\)10/month) Groq, DeepSeek, Together \(0.0002-\)0.0008
Standard (\(10-\)100/month) Mistral, Cohere, AI21 \(0.001-\)0.007
Premium ($100+/month) OpenAI, Anthropic, Google \(0.003-\)0.015

Getting Started with Providers

1. Set Up API Keys

Configure the providers you want to use:

# Premium providers
export OPENAI_API_KEY="your-openai-key"
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="your-anthropic-key"
export GOOGLE_API_KEY="your-google-key"

# Budget providers  
export GROQ_API_KEY="your-groq-key"
export DEEPSEEK_API_KEY="your-deepseek-key"
export TOGETHER_API_KEY="your-together-key"

2. Test Provider Connectivity

# Test all configured providers
knollm providers test

# Test specific providers
knollm providers test openai anthropic groq

# Check provider status
knollm providers status

3. Choose Your Strategy

from claif_knollm import KnollmClient, RoutingStrategy

# Let Knollm choose the best provider automatically
client = KnollmClient(
    routing_strategy=RoutingStrategy.BALANCED,
    fallback_providers=["openai", "groq", "deepseek"]
)

# Make a request - provider chosen automatically
response = await client.create_completion(
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello!"}]
)

print(f"Response from: {response.provider}")

Provider Comparison Tools

Use Knollm's built-in tools to compare providers:

CLI Comparison

# Compare providers by capability
knollm providers compare openai anthropic google --capability vision

# Compare by cost
knollm providers compare groq deepseek together --sort-by cost

# Detailed comparison table
knollm providers list --format detailed --tier premium

Programmatic Comparison

from claif_knollm import ProviderRegistry

registry = ProviderRegistry()

# Get providers by tier
premium_providers = registry.get_providers_by_tier("premium")
budget_providers = registry.get_providers_by_tier("budget")

# Compare specific providers
comparison = registry.compare_providers(
    ["openai", "anthropic", "groq"],
    criteria=["cost", "speed", "quality"]
)

for provider, scores in comparison.items():
    print(f"{provider}: {scores}")

What's Next?

Dive deeper into the provider ecosystem:

  1. Provider Catalog → - Detailed information on all providers
  2. Provider Comparison → - Side-by-side feature comparison
  3. Integration Guide → - How to integrate specific providers
  4. Cost Optimization → - Minimize your provider costs

💡 Pro Tips

  • Start with 2-3 providers from different tiers for redundancy
  • Use cost-optimized routing for development, quality-optimized for production
  • Monitor provider performance with knollm providers stats
  • Set budget limits to avoid unexpected costs from premium providers