Model rankings updated July 2026 based on real usage data.
Tool calls (also known as function calls) give LLMs access to external tools. The LLM suggests which tool to call upon, and your system then executes the tool and provides the results back to the LLM, which formats the response into an answer to the original question. This pattern enables building AI agents, automated workflows, and intelligent systems that can query databases, call external APIs, and take action in the real world. OpenRouter standardizes the tool calling interface across models and providers, making it easy to integrate external tools with any supported model. These LLMs are the most popular models on OpenRouter with tool calling capabilities.
Based on top weekly usage data from millions of users accessing AI models for tool calling through OpenRouter.
MiMo-V2.5 is a native omnimodal model by Xiaomi. It delivers Pro-level agentic performance at roughly half the inference cost, while surpassing MiMo-V2-Omni in multimodal perception across image and video understanding tasks. Its 1M context window supports complete documents, extended conversations, and complex task contexts in a single pass, making it ideal for integration with agent frameworks where strong reasoning, rich perception, and cost efficiency all matter.

DeepSeek V4 Flash is an efficiency-optimized Mixture-of-Experts model from DeepSeek with 284B total parameters and 13B activated parameters, supporting a 1M-token context window. It is designed for fast inference and high-throughput workloads, while maintaining strong reasoning and coding performance.
The model includes hybrid attention for efficient long-context processing. Reasoning efforts high and xhigh are supported; xhigh maps to max reasoning. It is well suited for applications such as coding assistants, chat systems, and agent workflows where responsiveness and cost efficiency are important.

Hy3 is a 295B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model from Tencent (21B active, 192 experts with top-8 routing) built for reasoning, agentic workflows, and real-world production use. It supports a configurable reasoning effort: a direct no-think mode by default, plus low and high chain-of-thought modes for complex math, coding, and multi-step problems. With a 256K context window, Hy3 targets long-horizon tasks, including improved coreference resolution, multi-turn constraint tracking, and stable tool-calling that generalizes across agent scaffoldings.
Tencent positions it as a reliable, cost-effective option across coding, document processing, financial analysis, game development, and frontend design, with a strong emphasis on grounded, anti-hallucination behavior that answers when grounded and flags when evidence is missing rather than fabricating.

DeepSeek V4 Pro is a large-scale Mixture-of-Experts model from DeepSeek with 1.6T total parameters and 49B activated parameters, supporting a 1M-token context window. It is designed for advanced reasoning, coding, and long-horizon agent workflows, with strong performance across knowledge, math, and software engineering benchmarks.
Built on the same architecture as DeepSeek V4 Flash, it introduces a hybrid attention system for efficient long-context processing. Reasoning efforts high and xhigh are supported; xhigh maps to max reasoning. It is well suited for complex workloads such as full-codebase analysis, multi-step automation, and large-scale information synthesis, where both capability and efficiency are critical.
GLM 5.2 is a large-scale reasoning model from Z.ai. It supports text input and output with a 1M-token context window, and is suited for long-horizon agent workflows, project-level software engineering, and complex multi-step automation.
Reasoning efforts high and xhigh are supported; xhigh maps to max reasoning. It is particularly strong at coding and tool use across long-running tasks, able to maintain engineering context and follow standards consistently through a full development workflow, from requirements to multi-platform deployment, in a single task.
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra is an open frontier-reasoning and orchestration model from NVIDIA, with 55B active parameters out of 550B total (MoE). Built on a hybrid Transformer-Mamba mixture-of-experts architecture, it supports text input and output with a context window of up to 1M tokens. It is suited for long-running agentic workflows, including agent orchestration, coding agents, deep research, and complex enterprise tasks.
It is particularly strong at multi-step reasoning and planning, with high-throughput inference designed for high-volume agent pipelines. It is part of the NVIDIA Nemotron family of open models for agentic AI.
MiniMax-M3 is a multimodal foundation model from MiniMax. It supports text, image, and video inputs with text output, a 1M-token context window, and is suited for long-horizon agentic work, coding, and tool use. It is built on MiniMax Sparse Attention (MSA), which replaces full attention with KV-block selection to cut per-token compute at long context — roughly 1/20 the cost of the previous generation at 1M tokens, with substantially faster prefill and decode while retaining quality across most tasks.
Trained as a native multimodal model on interleaved data and tuned for multi-turn, production-like collaboration via an interactive user-simulator framework, the model is oriented toward sustained, multi-step tasks rather than single-turn execution.
Step 3.7 Flash is StepFun's latest high-efficiency multimodal Mixture-of-Experts model. It pairs a 196B-parameter language backbone with a vision encoder for native image and video understanding, activating roughly 11B parameters per token. The model supports a 256K context window and exposes selectable reasoning levels (high/medium/low), letting callers trade off speed, cost, and depth of reasoning.
Designed for coding, agentic workflows, structured outputs, and long-context productivity tasks.
Claude Opus 4.8 is Anthropic's most capable generally available model in the Opus family. It supports text, image, and file inputs with text output, with reasoning support and a 1M-token context window. It is suited for highly autonomous agents, long-horizon agentic work, knowledge work, and memory-driven tasks where coherence over extended sessions matters.
It is particularly strong on multi-step reasoning, complex coding, and end-to-end project orchestration - large codebases, multi-stage debugging, and long-running asynchronous agent pipelines. Beyond coding, it handles knowledge work such as drafting documents, building presentations, and analyzing data, maintaining quality across very long outputs.

Kimi K3 is a 2.8T parameter open-weight multimodal reasoning model from Moonshot AI. It is suited for complex coding, knowledge work, and long-horizon agentic workflows, and is particularly strong at navigating large repositories, using tools, debugging, and iterating against images, logs, tests, and runtime feedback. Its architecture uses KDA and Attention Residuals for computational efficiency.
Sonnet 5 is Anthropic's most capable Sonnet-class model, with frontier performance across coding, agents, and professional work. It supports adaptive thinking with selectable reasoning effort levels (low, medium, high, max, and x-high), a 1M-token context window, and text, image, and file inputs. Sonnet 5 uses an updated tokenizer and includes real-time cyber safeguards that block certain high-risk dual-use activities.
Gemini 3 Flash Preview is a high speed, high value thinking model designed for agentic workflows, multi turn chat, and coding assistance. It delivers near Pro level reasoning and tool use performance with substantially lower latency than larger Gemini variants, making it well suited for interactive development, long running agent loops, and collaborative coding tasks. Compared to Gemini 2.5 Flash, it provides broad quality improvements across reasoning, multimodal understanding, and reliability.
The model supports a 1M token context window and multimodal inputs including text, images, audio, video, and PDFs, with text output. It includes configurable reasoning via thinking levels (minimal, low, medium, high), structured output, tool use, and automatic context caching. Gemini 3 Flash Preview is optimized for users who want strong reasoning and agentic behavior without the cost or latency of full scale frontier models.
Sonnet 4.6 is Anthropic's most capable Sonnet-class model yet, with frontier performance across coding, agents, and professional work. It excels at iterative development, complex codebase navigation, end-to-end project management with memory, polished document creation, and confident computer use for web QA and workflow automation.
Opus 4.7 is the next generation of Anthropic's Opus family, built for long-running, asynchronous agents. Building on the coding and agentic strengths of Opus 4.6, it delivers stronger performance on complex, multi-step tasks and more reliable agentic execution across extended workflows. It is especially effective for asynchronous agent pipelines where tasks unfold over time - large codebases, multi-stage debugging, and end-to-end project orchestration.
Beyond coding, Opus 4.7 brings improved knowledge work capabilities - from drafting documents and building presentations to analyzing data. It maintains coherence across very long outputs and extended sessions, making it a strong default for tasks that require persistence, judgment, and follow-through.
For users upgrading from earlier Opus versions, see our official migration guide here
Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite is a lightweight reasoning model in the Gemini 2.5 family, optimized for ultra-low latency and cost efficiency. It offers improved throughput, faster token generation, and better performance across common benchmarks compared to earlier Flash models. By default, "thinking" (i.e. multi-pass reasoning) is disabled to prioritize speed, but developers can enable it via the Reasoning API parameter to selectively trade off cost for intelligence.
Ling-3.0-flash is a 124B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model, with approximately 5.1B parameters activated per token.
The model is designed with token efficiency and production-scale agentic inference as key priorities, enabling developers to complete more useful work within constrained token, latency, and serving-cost budgets.
Gemini 2.5 Flash is Google's state-of-the-art workhorse model, specifically designed for advanced reasoning, coding, mathematics, and scientific tasks. It includes built-in "thinking" capabilities, enabling it to provide responses with greater accuracy and nuanced context handling.
Additionally, Gemini 2.5 Flash is configurable through the "max tokens for reasoning" parameter, as described in the documentation (https://dynamicsinfo.com/docs/use-cases/reasoning-tokens#max-tokens-for-reasoning).
MiMo-V2.5-Pro is Xiaomi’s flagship model, delivering strong performance in general agentic capabilities, complex software engineering, and long-horizon tasks, with top rankings on benchmarks such as ClawEval, GDPVal, and SWE-bench Pro. It can independently and autonomously complete professional tasks that would take human experts days or weeks, involving more than a thousand tool calls. Its context length of up to 1M makes it well suited for integration with a wide range of agent frameworks.
Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite is Google’s GA high-efficiency multimodal model optimized for low-latency, high-volume workloads. It supports text, image, video, audio, and PDF inputs, and is designed for lightweight agentic workflows, simple data extraction, and applications where responsiveness and API cost are the primary constraints.
Supports full thinking levels (minimal, low, medium, high) for fine-grained cost/performance trade-offs. Priced at half the cost of Gemini 3 Flash.
Grok 4.5 is SpaceXAI's smartest model with frontier performance on coding, knowledge work, and STEM.