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πŸ“– The AI Tool Bible

Llama vs Llama 3

A side-by-side look at pricing, capabilities, pros, cons, and our editorial scores.

Tagline
Llama
Meta's open-weight LLM family covering 1B mobile models up to 405B frontier and natively multimodal 10M-context Llama 4 variants.
Llama 3
Meta's open-weights LLM family that put serious frontier-adjacent models in everyone's hands.
Pricing
Llama
FreemiumΒ· Basic: $15 Β· Pro: $30 Β· Enterprise: $100
Llama 3
FreeΒ· Weights free under Meta Llama Community License; inference cost via self-hosting or 3rd-party providers
Lowest paid tier
Llama
$15 Β· Basic
captured 2026-08-10
Llama 3
β€”
Free trial
Llama
Yes
Llama 3
Yes
API
Llama
Yes
Llama 3
Not listed
Platforms
Llama
api
Llama 3
cli
Open source
Llama
Yes
Llama 3
Yes
Model used
Llama
Llama 4 (Maverick, Scout), Llama 3.3/3.2/3.1
Llama 3
Llama 3 / 3.1 (8B, 70B, 405B)
Best for
Llama
Pick Llama if you need open weights you can fine-tune, quantise, and self-host with a license that survives commercial deployment at scale.
Llama 3
Pick Llama 3 if you want a capable, ownable LLM you can fine-tune, quantize, and deploy without a per-token vendor relationship.
Not for
Llama
Skip it if you want a turnkey hosted chatbot with first-class tool use and you don't care about owning the weights.
Llama 3
Skip it if you need a fully managed, SLA-backed first-party API with no DevOps and the latest multimodal frontier features out of the box.
Editorial score
Llama
8.3 / 10
Llama 3
8.3 / 10
Use cases
Llama
self-hosted-llmfine-tuningmultimodal-chatsynthetic-dataedge-inferencerag-backbone
Llama 3
chatlong-context reasoningfine-tuning baselocal inferenceRAG backboneagent workloads
Pros
Llama
  • Open weights from 1B edge models to 405B frontier with permissive commercial license
  • Natively multimodal Llama 4 with up to 10M-token context
  • Runs anywhere: Ollama, vLLM, llama.cpp, Bedrock, Groq, Together
  • Aggressive inference pricing on partner clouds (~$0.19-$0.49/M tokens)
  • Huge fine-tuning ecosystem and community tooling
Llama 3
  • Open weights with permissive commercial use up to 700M MAU
  • Massive ecosystem: Ollama, llama.cpp, vLLM, Hugging Face, Unsloth
  • Multiple sizes from laptop-friendly 8B to frontier-class 405B
  • 128K context in 3.1 generation, strong instruction tuning
  • Cheap inference via Groq, Together, Fireworks, Replicate
Cons
Llama
  • License is source-available, not OSI-approved (700M MAU clause)
  • Tool-use and agentic reasoning still trail GPT-4o and Claude on hardest tasks
  • No polished first-party chat product or hosted playground
  • Largest models require serious GPU budget to self-host
Llama 3
  • No first-party hosted API; you bring your own infrastructure or provider
  • License excludes very large platforms (>700M MAU)
  • Original 3.0 release was English-heavy; multilingual lags closed models
  • 405B variant needs serious GPU budget to self-host
Website

Editorial score: rule-based, 0–10, from AI-assisted profile inputs (see /methodology) β€” not a user rating; β€œβ€”β€ means unscored. β€œNot listed” means we have no record of it, not that it is absent. GitHub figures and prices carry the date they were checked or captured; prices are shown as published, unconverted.

Pick Llama if
  • βœ… Open weights from 1B edge models to 405B frontier with permissive commercial license
  • βœ… Natively multimodal Llama 4 with up to 10M-token context
  • βœ… Runs anywhere: Ollama, vLLM, llama.cpp, Bedrock, Groq, Together
  • βœ… Aggressive inference pricing on partner clouds (~$0.19-$0.49/M tokens)
Pick Llama 3 if
  • βœ… Open weights with permissive commercial use up to 700M MAU
  • βœ… Massive ecosystem: Ollama, llama.cpp, vLLM, Hugging Face, Unsloth
  • βœ… Multiple sizes from laptop-friendly 8B to frontier-class 405B
  • βœ… 128K context in 3.1 generation, strong instruction tuning