CometAPI vs Orthogonal: Same Gateway Label, Two Different Jobs
CometAPI is a unified API gateway that routes calls to more than 500 foundation models at roughly 20% below official rates. Orthogonal is a separate unified API gateway that gives AI agents pay-per-call access to more than 40 third-party B2B and data services through one MCP-native key.
The short version
Builders comparing these two in 2026 are usually solving different problems. CometAPI suits anyone routing chat, code, or media requests across GPT, Claude, and Gemini, while Orthogonal suits agents that need to enrich a lead, scrape a page, or message Slack without writing five separate API contracts by hand.
CometAPI vs Orthogonal: Same Gateway Label, Two Different Jobs
CometAPI and Orthogonal both call themselves a unified AI API gateway, and as of August 2026 that is where the resemblance ends. One is a discount router to more than 500 foundation models. The other is a metered toll booth for AI agents that need to call outside services like Apollo.io, Slack, and Gmail. Nobody has written the two of them up side by side, because almost nobody treats them as the same category.
Who this comparison is actually for
If you build with AI models directly, you have probably heard of CometAPI. If you build AI agents that take actions in the world, you may have heard of Orthogonal instead, and rarely both. That split is the whole story here.
A two-person team shipping an agent product in 2026 does not pick one "AI gateway" and get everything. It picks a model router for the reasoning layer and, separately, a tool-access layer for anything the agent needs to touch outside the model call.
Pick CometAPI when the job is routing calls to GPT, Claude, Gemini, or an image and video model at a discount. Pick Orthogonal when the job is letting an agent read a lead's LinkedIn, scrape a page, or post to Slack without you writing five separate API integrations.
What is actually in each catalog
CometAPI's catalog is models. Point an OpenAI-compatible client at api.cometapi.com/v1, swap the model name, and reach more than 500 models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, DeepSeek, and Alibaba, plus image, video, and voice generation, according to CometAPI's pricing page. There is no agent-tool layer here. It does not fetch a webpage or send an email; it returns a completion.
CometAPI's Enterprise tier adds custom volume pricing, a dedicated account manager, and unlimited requests per minute, but the entry point stays self-serve: sign up, no card, start on trial credits.
Orthogonal's catalog is the mirror image. Its live site lists more than 40 third-party services as of August 13, 2026, organized into go-to-market data, person and company enrichment, web scraping, search, and productivity connections, per Orthogonal's own site.
Apollo.io sits inside that catalog as a named lead-enrichment partner, alongside People Data Labs and Coresignal for company data, ScrapeGraph for scraping, and Composio for Slack and Gmail access. None of it is a foundation model. An agent calls Orthogonal to look something up or take an action, then still needs a model like Claude or GPT to decide what to do with the result.
Access runs through three surfaces: a hosted MCP server at mcp.orth.sh, a TypeScript SDK, and a CLI tool. That is deliberate. Orthogonal was built assuming the caller is an agent, not a person filling in a dashboard form, so every catalog entry ships as a self-describing skill that bundles the authentication, parameters, and error handling an agent needs to call it without reading vendor docs first.
The price comparison nobody needed, and the one that matters
Here is the number everyone expects: CometAPI prices Claude Opus 5 at $4.00 per million input tokens against the official $5.00, and GPT 5.6 at the same $4.00 against $5.00 official, per its own pricing page checked August 13, 2026. Gemini 3.6 Flash runs $1.20 against $1.50 official. FLUX 2 MAX images cost $0.008 each against $0.01. That is a real discount, roughly 20% across the board, with no monthly minimum and credits that never expire.
Orthogonal does not compete on that number because it is not selling model tokens. Its pricing is per call: a $10 free credit grant on signup, no card required, then charges as low as $0.01 per call depending on the provider, according to Orthogonal's site. There is no published flat-rate card, so budgeting an agent's monthly cost means running it and watching the meter, which is a real weakness, not a footnote.
Comparing these two numbers is comparing a per-token bill to a per-tool-call bill for services that do not overlap. The honest price question is not "which is cheaper" but "which meter applies to the thing you are building."
Video pricing shows the same split in miniature. CometAPI bills MiniMax H3 video generation at $0.08 per second, a number with no Orthogonal equivalent, because Orthogonal does not generate anything. It fetches and acts.
Where CometAPI wins
Pick CometAPI if you are building a chat product, a coding assistant, or anything that needs to route between several LLMs and keep the code identical across providers. Its real competitive set, by its own admission, is OpenRouter, Together AI, and Replicate, not Orthogonal.
Against OpenRouter specifically, CometAPI's edge is the non-text catalog: image, video, and voice models sit behind the same key, where OpenRouter stays close to text and reasoning models. Against Together AI, the trade runs the other way. Together AI wins when a workload needs dedicated GPU capacity or fine-tuning, not simple request routing.
A four-person startup A/B testing Claude against GPT-5.6 on the same prompt, without separate contracts for each vendor, is exactly who this tool is built for. So is a solo developer prototyping a video-generation feature who does not want a second vendor relationship just to test one model.
Where Orthogonal wins
Pick Orthogonal if your agent needs to act, not just answer. A founder building a sales-outreach agent that pulls a contact's title from Apollo.io's enrichment API, checks their company on People Data Labs, and drops a summary into Slack has no reason to write three separate API clients. One Orthogonal key and an MCP server at mcp.orth.sh cover all three, and the response returns the exact cost of that call so spend is visible per action, not estimated in arrears.
That MCP-native setup is the other real difference. Orthogonal drops into Claude Desktop or Cursor with one JSON config block and a restart. CometAPI has no MCP support at all; it is a plain HTTP endpoint by design, built for a server calling it, not an agent discovering it.
Neither company has published a SOC 2 or GDPR attestation as of August 2026. CometAPI was founded in 2025 and operates web-only with a public GitHub organization. Orthogonal is a two-person team, also founded in 2025, that closed a $4.3 million seed round led by Pantera Capital and graduated from Y Combinator's W26 batch, according to Orthogonal's Y Combinator profile. Neither track record rules out either tool for a startup; both would need a longer history before a regulated enterprise buyer signs off.
The turn: is this split actually stable
The strongest objection to treating these as unrelated: Orthogonal's own Y Combinator listing names "AI Model APIs" as one of its four initial focus verticals, alongside search, scraping, and datasets. Read quickly, that sounds like Orthogonal is already routing foundation-model calls, which would make it a direct CometAPI competitor after all.
It is not, not yet. The live catalog at orthogonal.com, checked August 13, 2026, lists exactly four category groups: GTM data, person and company enrichment, web scraping, and search. No model-inference skill appears among the 40-plus services on offer today. The YC blurb's fourth vertical reads as a stated intention rather than a shipped feature, and until that changes, the split holds.
What switching actually costs
Moving off CometAPI means re-pointing a base URL and swapping model name strings; because the client is OpenAI-compatible, most integrations need nothing else. That low switching cost is also why CometAPI's own moat is thin: OpenRouter or Together AI could match the discount and the compatibility layer without much engineering effort, which is exactly the risk CometAPI's own market notes flag.
Moving off Orthogonal costs more. Every skill call is wired to its specific request and response shape, so replacing it means rebuilding each integration against Apollo.io, ScrapeGraph, or Composio directly, or finding another agent-tool gateway that wraps the same providers.
Two more frictions sit underneath that. Credit balances are pre-funded rather than held in a refundable account, so a team should check refund terms before loading a large balance. The catalog itself favors B2B and data APIs, so a team needing something outside that lane will not find it here yet.
Neither company publishes a migration guide for the other's territory, because neither expects you to be leaving for it.
Most teams shipping a real agent product in 2026 will not choose. They will wire a model gateway for reasoning and a tool gateway for action into the same pipeline, because an agent that can only think and not act is a chatbot, and an agent that can only act on a fixed script is automation, not AI. Budget for both meters from day one, not just the one that showed up first in a search result.
What would collapse this into a real rivalry
Watch two things over the next six months: whether Orthogonal's skill catalog grows a model-inference category, and whether CometAPI ships anything resembling a Slack or Apollo skill layer of its own. The day either happens, "CometAPI vs Orthogonal" stops being a lesson about mislabeled categories and becomes a comparison worth running for real.
Frequently asked questions
What is the actual difference between CometAPI and Orthogonal?
CometAPI routes calls to more than 500 foundation models, including GPT, Claude, Gemini, and image and video generators, through one OpenAI-compatible key. Orthogonal instead gives AI agents pay-per-call access to more than 40 third-party B2B and data APIs, like Apollo.io and ScrapeGraph, through a hosted MCP server. They share the label 'AI gateway' but almost no overlap in what they actually connect to.
How much does CometAPI cost compared to Orthogonal in 2026?
CometAPI bills per token or per generation at roughly 20% below official model prices, for example Claude Opus 5 at $4.00 per million tokens against $5.00 official, with no monthly minimum. Orthogonal grants $10 in free credits on signup, then bills per API call at rates as low as $0.01 depending on the provider, also with no subscription.
Can a team use CometAPI and Orthogonal together?
Yes, and most agent products in 2026 end up doing exactly that. CometAPI handles the reasoning layer by routing calls to a foundation model, while Orthogonal handles the action layer by letting that same agent call outside services like Slack, Gmail, or a data-enrichment API. Neither product replaces the other.
Is Orthogonal really an AI model gateway like CometAPI?
Not yet. Orthogonal's Y Combinator listing names 'AI Model APIs' as a future focus area, but its live catalog as of August 2026 covers only GTM data, person and company enrichment, web scraping, and search. No foundation-model inference skill is in the catalog today.
Which one should a solo developer start with?
Start with CometAPI if the first thing you are building is a chat or content feature that calls a model directly. Start with Orthogonal if you are building an agent that needs to take an action or pull outside data, since its MCP server drops into Claude Desktop or Cursor in one config step.
Covered in this guide
- CometAPI: CometAPI is a unified API gateway giving one key and one OpenAI-compatible endpoint to 500+ AI models at roughly 20% below official provider rates.
- Orthogonal: Unified API gateway for AI agents giving access to 30+ APIs via one key and MCP server, with $10 free credits and pay-per-call billing.
- Apollo.io: Apollo.io is a sales intelligence platform with a searchable B2B contact database, used by 500,000+ companies for prospecting and outreach.
- OpenRouter: Single API endpoint for 300+ AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others — one bill, no lock-in.
- Replicate: Run open-source AI models via API without managing any GPU infrastructure.
- Together AI: The AI Native Cloud—full-stack platform for training, fine-tuning, and deploying open-source AI models
Sources
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This guide covers a handful of options. Smart Match checks every listing in the directory against how you actually work and what you can spend, then hands you the shortlist and the reason behind each pick.
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