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Top 10 LLM API providers in 2025

January 11, 2025

Choosing the right large language model (LLM) API in 2025 can feel overwhelming, especially with so many providers offering different strengths, pricing, and features. In this blog, we’ll introduce the top 10 platforms — highlighting what they do best, how they price their services, and the specific scenarios they’re suited for.

Fireworks AI

What is Fireworks AI?
Fireworks AI is a generative inference platform built for speed, scalability, and production-readiness. Its proprietary FireAttention engine efficiently handles text, image, and audio tasks, while strict HIPAA and SOC2 compliance ensures data stays secure. The platform also offers on-demand deployment and the ability to fine-tune models for specific needs.

Why should you use Fireworks AI?
Fireworks AI keeps latency impressively low, so your applications feel smooth and responsive. Its hosting infrastructure is highly stable, minimizing downtime and performance issues. Plus, an active and supportive community ensures you can quickly find help and share insights as you build and optimize your AI projects.

Fireworks AI models
Fireworks AI hosts hundreds of open-source models, including popular text-based options like DeepSeek v3, Llama, and Qwen, as well as image-generation tools like Stable Diffusion. Multi-LoRA capabilities enable swift fine-tuning, so you can easily adapt models to meet your performance needs.

Fireworks AI pricing
Pricing is determined by model size and complexity. Smaller models, up to four billion parameters, start at $0.10 per million tokens, while larger or specialized models can run up to $3.00.

Together AI

What Is Together AI?
Together AI is a high-performance inference platform offering automated optimizations for over 200 open-source LLMs. It focuses on speed—often delivering sub-100ms latency—while handling crucial infrastructure tasks like token caching, load balancing, and model quantization.

Why Should You Use Together AI?
By offloading the heavy lifting of model infrastructure, Together AI streamlines your development process. Its proven ability to scale horizontally ensures consistent performance, even under heavy loads.

Together AI Models
Together AI supports hundreds of open-source LLMs. See all models

Together AI Pricing
View pricing

OpenRouter

What Is OpenRouter
OpenRouter is a unified interface that grants developers access to a wide range of AI models—both open-source and commercial—through a single API.

Why Should You Use OpenRouter?
It covers nearly every model on the market by serving as a proxy for providers like Fireworks and Together AI. This gives you the flexibility to switch between different LLMs based on your project's needs.

OpenRouter Models
You can call nearly any large language model, including options from OpenAI, Anthropic, Fireworks, and Together AI.

OpenRouter Pricing
No extra usage fees beyond model costs. A 5% Stripe deposit fee applies.

Groq

What Is Groq?
Groq is a high-speed inference platform built on LPU (Logical Processing Unit) technology. What is a LPU

Why Should You Use Groq?
Groq's LPU-powered infrastructure delivers unmatched speed, ideal for applications that demand low latency.

Groq Models and Pricing
Offers models like Llama and Mistral. View pricing

Hugging Face

What Is Hugging Face?
Hugging Face is an open-source platform for building, training, and deploying ML models—known as the “GitHub for AI.”

Why Should You Use Hugging Face?
A large model hub and integration with various clouds streamline AI experimentation and deployment.

Hugging Face Models
100,000+ open-source models for NLP, CV, and more.

Hugging Face Pricing
Pay-by-the-hour for hosted endpoints. View pricing

Replicate

What Is Replicate?
Replicate is a cloud platform to run and manage ML models—without deep infra knowledge.

Why Should You Use Replicate?
Easy deployment, no infrastructure management, and extensive community models.

Replicate Models
Thousands of community models and BYO support.

Replicate Pricing
Pay-as-you-go runtime billing. View pricing

Perplexity AI

What Is Perplexity AI?
An AI-powered search/Q&A engine with developer API access to real-time data via open-source LLMs.

Why Should You Use Perplexity AI?
Direct access to internet data—ideal for live applications like news, finance, and trends.

Perplexity AI Models
Llama-based models with 128k context:

llama-3.1-sonar-small-128k-online (8B)
llama-3.1-sonar-large-128k-online (70B)
llama-3.1-sonar-huge-128k-online (405B)

Perplexity AI Pricing
$5 per 1,000 requests + $0.20–$5 per million tokens.

Hyperbolic

What Is HyperBolic?
HyperBolic offers affordable GPU compute and inference for developers and startups.

Why Should You Use HyperBolic?
Get flexible GPU options at lower cost than cloud giants.

HyperBolic Pricing
Charged by GPU usage. View pricing

Databricks

What Is Databricks?
A unified data analytics platform with native AI/ML and its own LLM, DBRx.

Why Should You Use Databricks?
Great for teams already doing large-scale data engineering.

Databricks Models
DBRx: enterprise-grade LLM for NLP and analytics.

Databricks Pricing
Depends on compute/storage. View pricing on Databricks’ website.

Mistral

What Is Mistral?
A French AI company specializing in powerful, open-source LLMs.

Why Should You Use Mistral?
Easy deployment, strong reasoning, and tailored models.

Mistral Models

Mistral Large 24.11: 128k context, high-complexity tasks
Pixtral Large: Vision AI
Mistral Small 24.09: Cost-effective
Codestral: 80+ programming languages
Ministral 8B & 3B: Lightweight
Mistral Embed: Text embedding
Mistral Moderation 24.11: Policy-based moderation

Mistral Pricing
E.g., Mistral Large: $2M input / $6M output tokens. Smaller: ~$0.04M each.

Which LLM API Provider Is the Best?

It depends on your needs. Want speed? Try Groq or Fireworks AI. Real-time data? Go with Perplexity. Specialized models? Mistral. Community-driven experimentation? Hugging Face.