Artificial Intelligencedocker-readypermissive-license

vLLM: the best Open Source alternative to OpenAI API in 2026

vLLM is a high-performance inference engine for serving large-scale language models with maximum throughput, exposing an OpenAI-compatible API for production.

License Apache-2.0 ~29k stars (estimated)Website GitHub Repository

Technical profile

License: Apache-2.0
Category: Artificial Intelligence
Replaces: OpenAI API
Tech stack: PythonCUDA

Key features

Much higher throughput thanks to PagedAttention
OpenAI-compatible API
Supports dozens of model architectures

vLLM vs. OpenAI API

Pros

Purpose-built for serving LLMs in production at scale

Things to consider

Requires a GPU with enough VRAM for the chosen model

Quick Docker installation guide

Copy this docker-compose.yml, adjust the example passwords and run docker compose up -d on your server. See the full step-by-step guide →

docker-compose.yml

version: "3.9"
services:
  vllm:
    image: vllm/vllm-openai:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "8000:8000"
    command: ["--model", "mistralai/Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2"]
    volumes:
      - vllm_cache:/root/.cache/huggingface
volumes:
  vllm_cache: