Groq
The speed king — open models at 500+ tokens/second on custom LPU chips.
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sovereigntyGroq runs open models (Llama and friends) on its custom LPU hardware and is, as of mid-2026, the fastest mainstream inference API available — 500+ tokens per second, at prices mostly under $1 per million tokens (Llama 3.3 70B at $0.59/$0.79). If your product's bottleneck is latency — voice agents, live UX, rapid tool loops — Groq is the honest answer. It's a proprietary hosted platform, but like Together, the models themselves are open, so you're renting speed, not locking in your stack.
SOURCE-AVAILABLEProprietary (platform); serves open-weight models
LicenseProprietary (platform); serves open-weight models
PricingMost models under $1 per 1M tokens; Llama 3.3 70B $0.59/$0.79; batch −50%
Open sourceNo
Self-hostableNo
Local-first dataNo
What it does well
- +Fastest inference on the market (500+ tok/s)
- +Very low prices on open models
- +OpenAI-compatible API — near drop-in
Where it falls short
- −Hosted-only; custom hardware means no self-host path for the speed
- −Model catalog is narrower than Together's
Groq as an alternative to
Where Groq shows up in our comparisons, and how it ranked.
Groq head-to-head
Straight comparisons against the tools people weigh it against.