Llama (Meta) vs Phi-3
- ✦ Open source & free
- ✦ Self-hostable
- ✦ Llama 3.3 70B
- ✦ Edge deployment
- ✦ On-device inference
- ✦ Open-source (MIT)
Llama (Meta) and Phi-3 are both Large Language Models tools. Compare features, pricing, and ratings below to find the best fit for your team.
When to Choose Llama (Meta) vs Phi-3
The question that matters: “In what situation will I regret choosing A over B after 3 months?”
Fine-tuning on 5,000 deidentified patient notes reduces hallucinations from 12% to 2%. Legal teams achieve 85% higher statute retrieval precision after domain-specific training.
Fine-tune on proprietary codebases and naming patterns. A fintech backend team cut code review cycles 35% after training on 5,000 examples of internal Go microservices.
Llama 3.3 70B runs on private infrastructure with complete control over weights and inference logs. Zero records leave the internal network - financial services runs analysis 40%.
Multilingual capability via Groq API handles support across 35+ languages without separate models. Cost drops from $0.08 to $0.012 per request - $18K saved monthly at 6M queries.
Llama API calls via Groq summarize threads, extract action items, and write issue tracker tickets in sequence. 200 weekly meeting notes processed and ticketed in under 4 minutes.
Phi-3 Mini quantized to 4-bit runs inference on mobile devices without internet connectivity. Autocomplete and summaries generate 40% faster than API-dependent alternatives.
Multi-language capability processes user manuals and chatbot queries directly on embedded hardware. No external API calls eliminates bandwidth costs and network latency.
Quantization compresses from 7B to 2B effective size for resource-constrained hardware. A healthcare provider deployed to 200 clinical workstations with only a 2GB footprint each.
Pricing Comparison & PlansHigh· Verified May 30, 2026
Llama (Meta) Plans
Free tier available
Open Weights
FreeBest for: Get full model weights to download and self-host with commercial use allowed under 700M MAU
- ✓Download and self-host model weights
- ✓Commercial use allowed for products with under 700M monthly active users (MAU)
- ✓Access to multiple model sizes (e.g., 1B, 3B, 8B, 70B, 405B)
- ✓Support for fine-tuning, distillation, and quantization
- ✓Deploy on-premises or in any cloud environment
Enterprise License
Contact SalesBest for: This plan requires custom pricing, contact sales for organizations with over 700M monthly active users
- ✓Required for products with over 700M monthly active users (MAU)
- ✓Custom commercial license agreement with Meta
- ✓Direct enterprise partnership opportunities
- ✓Access to full model weights and deployment rights
- ✓Compliance with custom enterprise terms
Open-source. Token prices vary by cloud provider (AWS, Azure, Together AI).
Phi-3 Plans
Free tier available
Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct
Contact SalesBest for: This model requires a custom pricing agreement
- ✓Input: $0.00013 per 1,000 tokens
- ✓Output: $0.00052 per 1,000 tokens
- ✓Context length: 4K tokens
- ✓Pay-As-You-Go offering via Serverless APIs
Phi-3-mini-128k-instruct
Contact SalesBest for: This model requires a custom pricing agreement
- ✓Input: $0.00013 per 1,000 tokens
- ✓Output: $0.00052 per 1,000 tokens
- ✓Context length: 128K tokens
- ✓Pay-As-You-Go offering via Serverless APIs
Phi-3.5-mini-instruct
Contact SalesBest for: This model requires a custom pricing agreement
- ✓Input: $0.00013 per 1,000 tokens
- ✓Output: $0.00052 per 1,000 tokens
- ✓Context length: 128K tokens
- ✓Pay-As-You-Go offering via Serverless APIs
Phi-3-small-8k-instruct
Contact SalesBest for: This model requires a custom pricing agreement
- ✓Input: $0.00015 per 1,000 tokens
- ✓Output: $0.0006 per 1,000 tokens
- ✓Context length: 8K tokens
- ✓Pay-As-You-Go offering via Serverless APIs
Phi-3-small-128k-instruct
Contact SalesBest for: This model requires a custom pricing agreement
- ✓Input: $0.00015 per 1,000 tokens
- ✓Output: $0.0006 per 1,000 tokens
- ✓Context length: 128K tokens
- ✓Pay-As-You-Go offering via Serverless APIs
Phi-3-medium-4k-instruct
Contact SalesBest for: This model requires a custom pricing agreement
- ✓Input: $0.00017 per 1,000 tokens
- ✓Output: $0.00068 per 1,000 tokens
- ✓Context length: 4K tokens
- ✓Pay-As-You-Go offering via Serverless APIs
Phi-3-medium-128k-instruct
Contact SalesBest for: This model requires a custom pricing agreement
- ✓Input: $0.00017 per 1,000 tokens
- ✓Output: $0.00068 per 1,000 tokens
- ✓Context length: 128K tokens
- ✓Pay-As-You-Go offering via Serverless APIs
Open-source. Free to self-host, API pricing via Azure.
Capability Breakdown
16 differences found across 34 standardized features
- •Open source & free
- •Self-hostable
- •Llama 3.3 70B
- •Commercial license
- •Fine-tuning support
- •Runs locally
- •API via Groq/Together
- •Multilingual
- •Edge deployment
- •On-device inference
- •Open-source (MIT)
- •128K context
- •Code generation
- •Multi-language
- •Fine-tuning
- •Quantization
- •GGUF support
- •Azure integration
- •Local deployment
- •Low memory footprint
- •Fast inference
- •ONNX support
- •Function calling
- •JSON mode
- •System prompts
- •HuggingFace integration
- •Commercial use
- •No GPU required for small variants
- •REST API
- •Streaming API
- •SDK (Python, JS)
- •Batch Processing
Strengths & Limitations
Evaluative strengths and weaknesses: not feature lists
- +Permissive license allows for commercial use and modification
- +State-of-the-art performance for open-source models
- +Full data control and privacy via self-hosting
- +Massive ecosystem of fine-tuned models and tools (Hugging Face)
- +Available in multiple parameter sizes for diverse hardware
- −Self-hosting requires significant technical expertise and GPU resources
- −Less polished and integrated than proprietary APIs like OpenAI's
- −License has restrictions for companies with >700M monthly active users
- −Base models require extensive fine-tuning for specialized tasks
- −No official support or SLAs from Meta; relies on community
- +Runs efficiently on-device, enabling offline AI on phones and IoT
- +MIT license allows for commercial use with minimal restrictions
- +Outperforms larger models on key benchmarks (MMLU, GSM8K)
- +Quantized versions run on CPU, removing expensive GPU requirements
- +Optimized for instruction-following with a high-quality training dataset
- −Limited factual knowledge base compared to models trained on trillions of tokens
- −Struggles with complex, multi-step reasoning and niche topics
- −Not designed for extensive, open-ended conversational chat like larger models
- −Smaller context window (4K/128K) than some frontier models
- −Performance highly dependent on quantization and device hardware
At a Glance
Recent Price History
Phi-3 removed the "Azure AI Serverless API" plan
Plan removed · May 30, 2026
Phi-3 removed the "Open Source (Self-Hosted)" plan
Plan removed · May 30, 2026
Phi-3 added a new "Phi-3-medium-128k-instruct" plan (Custom pricing)
Plan added · May 30, 2026
Phi-3 added a new "Phi-3-medium-4k-instruct" plan (Custom pricing)
Plan added · May 30, 2026
Phi-3 added a new "Phi-3-small-128k-instruct" plan (Custom pricing)
Plan added · May 30, 2026
Plan added · May 21, 2026
Plan removed · May 21, 2026
Plan added · May 21, 2026
Plan removed · May 21, 2026
Frequently Asked Questions
Related Comparisons
Sources & Data Trail · Llama (Meta)
- 1.Official Website·Official vendor website
- 2.G2·G2 verified reviews · 4.6/5 · 152 reviews
- 3.Capterra·Capterra verified reviews · 4.7/5
- 4.TrustRadius·TrustRadius verified reviews
- 5.PeerSpot·PeerSpot enterprise peer reviews
Sources & Data Trail · Phi-3
- 1.Official Pricing Page·Source of verified tiers(Checked: 2026-05-30)
- 2.Official Website·Official vendor website
- 3.G2·G2 verified reviews · 4/5
- 4.Capterra·Capterra verified reviews · 4/5