Your comment implied that SDL is better than OpenGL despite that all SDL really does with respect to rendering APIs is provide a cross-platform means to create a window with a corresponding OpenGL context since there's no standard way of doing this; each windowing API has their own ways of creating an OpenGL context and associating that to a viewport in a window. You still have to make the usual OpenGL calls to actually do anything with regards to rendering a 3D object on screen. In that case, one could argue that GLFW "beats" OpenGL by providing a simple and cross-platform means to an OpenGL context across different operating systems, and the associated windows to use them. Though at the end of the day, both APIs are only really simplifying an unstandardized means to create a context for an OpenGL viewport; they're not actually doing any kind of lifting with respect to rendering its self.

I wasn't aware that SDL was a graphics API that beat OpenGL! This is some pretty heavy stuff, I think I'll have to research SDL's 3D acceleration APIs: http://www.libsdl.org/opengl/index.php