vLLMvsGroq

Full side-by-side comparison — features, pricing, platforms, and which one wins in 2026.

vLLM

Local AI Infrastructure

High-throughput LLM serving engine

Groq

LLM APIs & Inference

The fastest AI inference platform — LPU-powered, 1000+ tokens/sec

FeaturevLLMGroq
CategoryLocal AI InfrastructureLLM APIs & Inference
PricingFree (open-source)Free tier available, pay-per-token for production
GitHub Stars
More stars
45k
PlatformsLinuxWeb
Key Features
  • PagedAttention
  • Continuous batching
  • Tensor parallelism
  • OpenAI-compatible API
  • Multi-GPU
  • Quantization
  • LPU hardware — custom chips for inference, not repurposed GPUs
  • GPT OSS 120B at 500 tok/s ($0.15/M input)
  • GPT OSS 20B at 1000 tok/s ($0.075/M input)
  • Llama 4 Scout 17B at 750 tok/s with 131K context + vision
  • Qwen3-32B at 400 tok/s with 131K context
  • Compound AI systems with web search + code execution
  • Whisper transcription ($0.04-0.11/hour)
  • OpenAI-compatible API — drop-in replacement
  • Free developer tier: 250-300K TPM, 1K RPM
Pros
  • + Extremely fast inference
  • + Efficient GPU memory usage
  • + OpenAI-compatible API
  • + Continuous batching
  • + Production-ready
  • + Fastest inference available (500-1000 tok/s)
  • + Free tier with generous limits (250K+ tokens/min)
  • + OpenAI-compatible API — swap one line of code
  • + Latest open-source models (GPT OSS, Llama 4, Qwen3)
  • + Compound AI for agentic workflows (search + code exec)
Cons
  • Requires NVIDIA GPU
  • Complex setup for beginners
  • Limited model format support
  • Heavy resource requirements
  • Cloud-only — cannot self-host LPU hardware
  • Rate limits on free tier (1K RPM)
  • Smaller model catalog than running locally via Ollama
Tags
open-sourceinferenceservinggpuhigh-throughput
inferencefastfreehardware

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