Choosing a Node.js LLM library in 2026 is mostly a question of which trade-offs your team can carry for the next two years. The realistic shortlist is the provider SDKs (openai, @anthropic-ai/sdk, @google/genai), the Vercel AI SDK, LangChain.js with LangGraph.js, Mastra, the OpenAI Agents SDK, and lighter multi-provider libraries such as IntelliNode.
Streaming chat inside a React or Next.js product points to the Vercel AI SDK. Stateful agent workflows with tracing point to LangGraph.js or Mastra. A vendor you will never change points to its own SDK. One small backend API across OpenAI, Claude, Gemini and local models, with a Python twin, is where IntelliNode fits. Below are the numbers, the code, and where each option falls short.
