Free-tier head-to-head comparison.
Pick Groq when latency-sensitive apps (sub-second response). chatbots, autocomplete, agents needing fast tool-use.
Pick Cerebras Inference when real-time ux where latency dominates — coding copilots, voice agents, live transcription summarization.
| Feature | Groq | Cerebras Inference |
|---|---|---|
| Top model | llama-3.3-70b-versatile | llama-3.3-70b |
| Free RPM | 30 | 30 |
| Free RPD | 14,400 | — |
| Free credit | — | — |
| Card required | No | No |
| OpenAI-compatible | Yes | Yes |
| API base | https://api.groq.com/openai/v1 | https://api.cerebras.ai/v1 |
| Best for | Latency-sensitive apps (sub-second response). Chatbots, autocomplete, agents needing fast tool-use. | Real-time UX where latency dominates — coding copilots, voice agents, live transcription summarization. |
| Not for | Vision, image generation, embeddings (Groq is text-only LLM inference). | Vision or multimodal tasks; closed-model needs. |