AI providers

Compare the main AI providers in the stack, understand what each is best at, and choose the right model platform for your product.

Providers are the model backends and capability platforms that actually power your AI features. Choosing the right one affects latency, cost, multimodal support, reasoning quality, tool support, and how much flexibility you have as your product evolves.

There is rarely one perfect provider for everything. Most strong AI products choose a default provider for the common path, then add others only when they create a clear product advantage.

Overview

This section is meant to help you choose and understand providers, not just configure environment variables. Start with the providers that match your capability needs, then go deeper into setup and app-specific docs when you are ready to implement.

For broadest capability coverage

OpenAI is a strong starting point if you want text, vision, speech, transcription, embeddings, and image generation in one ecosystem.

For strong Claude-style reasoning and writing

Anthropic is a natural fit for high-quality writing, deep analysis, and assistant-style workflows with tool use.

For Gemini and multimodal workflows

Google AI is especially relevant when you want Gemini, embeddings, file input, and broader multimodal experiences.

For open-source image model access

Replicate is useful when you want a wide range of image and niche community models without hosting them yourself.

Available providers

These pages cover the providers that make the most sense for the current AI section. Each one explains where the provider fits best rather than treating setup as the only thing that matters.

OpenAI

General-purpose models across text, vision, speech, transcription, image generation, and embeddings.

Anthropic

Claude models for thoughtful writing, analysis, tool use, and assistant-style experiences.

Google AI

Gemini, multimodal inputs, embeddings, grounding, and broader Google AI ecosystem support.

xAI

Grok models for chat, reasoning-oriented workflows, and selected multimodal use cases.

DeepSeek

DeepSeek models for cost-sensitive reasoning and text-heavy workflows.

Replicate

Cloud access to open-source and specialized models, especially for image generation.

ElevenLabs

Speech-first platform for TTS, STT, voice cloning, and broader audio experiences.

Provider selection

Provider choice is usually easier when you anchor it in the product problem instead of the model hype cycle. This quick comparison is a good starting point.

If you need...	A good starting page
One provider with broad modality coverage	OpenAI
Strong writing and assistant-style reasoning	Anthropic
Gemini and multimodal Google workflows	Google AI
Open-source image models and experimentation	Replicate
Speech-first product features	ElevenLabs
Open-weight model flexibility	Meta

Provider pages are most useful when read alongside the capability pages. That is where you can see how provider choice maps to actual product features.

Generating text

Understand where provider choice matters for chat, writing, and structured output.

Image generation

Compare providers based on image quality, model ecosystem, and product fit.

Embeddings

See which providers matter when retrieval and semantic search are involved.

Speech

Compare provider ecosystems for TTS, voice UX, and audio generation.