Together AI vs vLLM

Side-by-side comparison of Together AI and vLLM: pricing, features, API access, and community ratings.

AI comparison summary

Together AI is a managed cloud platform offering end-to-end AI infrastructure with proprietary optimizations and cutting-edge research, ideal if you want a fully hosted solution with industry-leading speed and don't want to manage infrastructure. vLLM is an open-source serving engine you deploy yourself, offering maximum flexibility, extensive hardware compatibility, and advanced features like multi-LoRA and speculative decoding—best if you need full control, want to avoid vendor lock-in, or have specific deployment requirements. Together AI trades setup complexity for convenience and speed guarantees, while vLLM trades ease-of-use for customizability and transparency.

Together AI
Together AI

The AI Native Cloud — full-stack platform for inference, compute, and model shaping

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vLLM
vLLM

Easy, fast, and cheap LLM serving for everyone

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Category
AI infrastructure
AI infrastructure
Pricing
Freemium
Freemium
Starting price
Free tier
Audience
Technical
All audiences
API available
Open source
Self-hostable
Model provider
Open-source models (e.g., DeepSeek, Gemma, Llama, Qwen, GLM, MiniMax, Kimi)
Founded
2022
2023
Headquarters
San Francisco, USA
Berkeley, United States
Key strengths
  • ·Industry-leading inference speed (31%+ more TPS than next-fastest OSS engine)
  • ·Full-stack platform: inference, compute, fine-tuning, storage, and sandboxes
  • ·Cutting-edge in-house research (FlashAttention, ThunderKittens, ATLAS)
  • ·Broad open-source model library with serverless and dedicated deployment options
  • ·State-of-the-art serving throughput
  • ·PagedAttention for efficient KV memory management
  • ·Continuous batching and chunked prefill
  • ·Broad quantization support (FP8, INT8, INT4, GPTQ/AWQ, GGUF, etc.)