OmniRoute for GitHub Copilot Chat

1200+ AI models in your Copilot Chat — free & forever free.
340+ providers, 90+ with free tiers, one endpoint. MIT open source.

🧩 Install from the VS Code Marketplace
🔓 Install from Open VSX (Cursor, Windsurf, VSCodium, Theia, code-server…)

🌐 OmniRoute on GitHub • 🔌 Extension source • 🐛 Issues

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Don't replace Copilot — power it up. No new sidebar to learn, no new chat UI. This extension drops every model from your OmniRoute server — Kimi, Claude, GPT, Gemini, GLM, DeepSeek, Qwen, Llama and hundreds more across 340+ providers, 90+ of them with free tiers that stay free — straight into the model picker of the Copilot Chat you already use. Including VS Code Insiders.

🆓 No Copilot subscription required. Since VS Code 1.122, provider models work without a GitHub sign-in and without any Copilot plan. VS Code + OmniRoute + this extension = a fully working AI chat with agent mode, for free.

Why this extension?

• 1200+ models, one picker. OmniRoute unifies 340+ providers (OpenAI-compatible, Anthropic, Gemini, Ollama, local, OAuth-based free tiers…) behind a single endpoint — 90+ providers are free, and free forever. Every model it serves shows up in your Copilot Chat model dropdown.
• Agent mode, tool calling, MCP, instructions — all of it still works. This plugs into VS Code's native language-model provider API, so Copilot's entire stack now runs on the model you choose.
• Vision included. Models flagged as vision-capable in the OmniRoute catalog accept image attachments directly in chat.
• Combos & auto-fallback. OmniRoute combos (priority, round-robin, cost-optimized, fusion…) appear as regular models — pick one and get automatic failover across providers behind the scenes.
• Online at a glance. A status-bar dot and an Activity Bar panel show whether your OmniRoute server is reachable, how many models it serves, and where to configure everything — URL and API key included.
• Speaks your language. The UI ships in 42 languages, mirroring OmniRoute's own catalog — VS Code picks the one matching your display language automatically.
• Configure your other tools too. One command configures Codex CLI, Claude Code, Cline, Continue, Cursor, Aider and more to use OmniRoute — powered by the omniroute CLI under the hood.
• Secure by default. The API key lives in VS Code's SecretStorage (OS keychain), never in settings.json.

Getting started

1. Run OmniRoute (60 seconds)

npm install -g omniroute
omniroute        # dashboard at http://localhost:20128

Add your providers/keys in the dashboard — or use the built-in free ones. Full guide: github.com/diegosouzapw/OmniRoute.

Already running OmniRoute somewhere else (home server, VPS, tunnel)? Point the extension at it — see below.

2. Install this extension

Search for "OmniRoute" in the VS Code Extensions view — it resolves from the Marketplace on VS Code and from Open VSX on forks like Cursor, Windsurf and VSCodium. Or grab the .vsix from the releases.

3. Pick a model

1. Open Copilot Chat and click the model picker
2. Choose Manage Models… → OmniRoute
3. Tick the models you want — they now live in your picker

That's it. If OmniRoute runs on the default http://localhost:20128, there is nothing to configure.

Remote server / API key

Click the OmniRoute icon in the Activity Bar (or run OmniRoute: Manage Connection, or click the status-bar dot) to open the connection panel:

• Server URL — e.g. http://my-vps:20128 (the /v1 suffix is added automatically)
• API key — only if your OmniRoute requires one (REQUIRE_API_KEY); stored in the OS keychain
• Save & Test — instant feedback with the live model count

Configure your coding CLIs

Run OmniRoute: Configure Coding CLI and pick a tool — the extension drives the omniroute CLI to generate ready-to-use profiles:

Settings

Reasoning effort

Models with extended thinking (GPT-5.x, Claude with thinking, DeepSeek R1, Gemini Thinking…) accept a reasoning tier. When VS Code shows an effort control next to the model, that choice is forwarded to OmniRoute as reasoning_effort — you do not have to configure anything.

omnicopilot.defaultReasoningEffort covers the case where the editor exposes no control. It uses OmniRoute's canonical vocabulary — none, low, medium, high, xhigh — and the server downshifts a tier a model does not implement, so asking for xhigh is always safe.

The default is applied only to models the catalog marks as reasoning-capable: sending the field to a model without thinking support is ignored at best and rejected with a 400 at worst. An explicit choice from the chat UI always wins over the setting.

Agents window (experimental)

Turn on omnicopilot.exposeToAgentsWindow to also register every tool-calling OmniRoute model for the Copilot Agents window (the Copilot CLI agent host). VS Code scopes these entries to agent-host sessions, so they appear in the Agents window's model picker instead of the regular chat picker — the regular picker keeps working unchanged.

Prerequisites, both on the VS Code side:

1. Enable the experimental VS Code setting chat.agentHost.byokModels.enabled.
2. Restart the agent host (or reload the window) after flipping the settings.

This rides a proposed VS Code API (targetChatSessionType), which is why it ships opt-in and default-off: the mechanism can change under us in a VS Code update. If the entries show up duplicated in the regular picker instead of the Agents window, your VS Code build does not support the proposal yet — turn the setting back off.

Your usage in the panel

When OmniRoute runs a recent enough version, the Activity Bar panel shows a My usage section — your key's own daily/weekly spend against its limit, the reset time, and the quota of each provider connection (Codex, Claude, OpenCode…) side by side.

It reads the self-service endpoint GET /api/usage/om-usage?format=json with your connection's API key — the same data as the terminal @@om-usage command, never the management surface.

Three states are normal and distinct:

• "Usage is not enabled for this key" — the key lacks the allowUsageCommand flag, which is off by default. An admin turns it on per key in OmniRoute's API-key manager. This is a setting, not an error.
• "nothing is cached yet" — the key is allowed but the server has no learned quota for the connection yet. It fills in after the first requests.
• No section at all — the OmniRoute server predates ?format=json; the panel hides it rather than parse the older text form.

Requires OmniRoute with the usage JSON endpoint (v3.8.50+). See docs/CATALOG.md for the server version the feature matrix assumes.

Dashboard inside VS Code

Set omnicopilot.dashboardOpen to editor to open the OmniRoute dashboard in a VS Code tab instead of your browser. This needs the server to allow embedding, which is opt-in via DASHBOARD_ALLOW_EMBED=vscode (landed in OmniRoute #10273).

⚠️ That flag is read at build time — Next.js bakes the response headers into the route manifest — so exporting it in front of an already-installed server does nothing. It works on a build from source (DASHBOARD_ALLOW_EMBED=vscode npm run build), not on the prebuilt npm install -g omniroute package or the official Docker image. Full matrix in the OmniRoute guide.

Without an embed-enabled build the page refuses to frame; the extension detects that from the response headers and falls back to the external browser, so nothing breaks either way.

How the model list is built

Curious why the picker shows the number of models it shows, or why a provider you never configured is in there? → docs/CATALOG.md explains the duplicate-prefix mode, the non-chat filter and the free/keyless providers, with measured numbers.

Good to know

• Chat, agent mode and utility tasks run through your OmniRoute models. Inline code completions and embeddings-based features are outside VS Code's provider API and still require GitHub Copilot.
• On Copilot Business/Enterprise, admins can disable third-party model providers via the "Bring Your Own Language Model Key" policy.
• Requires VS Code 1.104+ (older versions than 1.122 also need a signed-in Copilot plan — that's a VS Code rule, not ours).

Free & open source

OmniRoute is MIT-licensed and free forever — ⭐ star it on GitHub and join the project. This extension is MIT too; issues and PRs welcome at diegosouzapw/OmniCopilot. Maintainers publishing a new version: see docs/PUBLISHING.md (Marketplace + Open VSX).

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OmniRoute is an independent open-source project, not affiliated with GitHub or Microsoft. GitHub Copilot is a trademark of GitHub, Inc.