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: $100Llama 3
FreeΒ· Weights free under Meta Llama Community License; inference cost via self-hosting or 3rd-party providersLowest paid tier
Llama
$15 Β· Basic
captured 2026-08-10
Llama 3
βFree trial
Llama
YesLlama 3
YesAPI
Llama
YesLlama 3
Not listedPlatforms
Llama
api
Llama 3
cli
Open source
Llama
YesLlama 3
YesModel used
Llama
Llama 4 (Maverick, Scout), Llama 3.3/3.2/3.1Llama 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 / 10Llama 3
8.3 / 10Use 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
Editorial score: rule-based, 0β10, from AI-assisted profile inputs (see /methodology) β not a user rating; βββ means unscored. βNot listedβ 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
- β Open weights from 1B edge models to 405B frontier with permissive commercial license
- β Natively multimodal Llama 4 with up to 10M-token context
- β Runs anywhere: Ollama, vLLM, llama.cpp, Bedrock, Groq, Together
- β Aggressive inference pricing on partner clouds (~$0.19-$0.49/M tokens)
Pick Llama 3 if
- β Open weights with permissive commercial use up to 700M MAU
- β Massive ecosystem: Ollama, llama.cpp, vLLM, Hugging Face, Unsloth
- β Multiple sizes from laptop-friendly 8B to frontier-class 405B
- β 128K context in 3.1 generation, strong instruction tuning