Groq vs Langfuse
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Groq and Langfuse.
🏆
Verdict: Langfuse wins
Langfuse scores 4.3/5, edging out Groq at 4.0/5. Engineering teams running LLM apps or agents in production who want framework-agnostic tracing and evaluation with either a cheap managed cloud or a free self-hosted stack.
Groq The fastest LLM inference in the world | Langfuse Open-source LLM observability and evaluation | |
|---|---|---|
| Rating | 4.0 (1 review) | 4.3 (1 review) |
| Pricing Model | usage-based | freemium |
| Starting Price | Pricing varies | Free tier available |
| Best For | Developers building latency-sensitive, high-volume applications — voice, extraction, classification, moderation — on open-weight models who want published speeds and rock-bottom token prices. | Engineering teams running LLM apps or agents in production who want framework-agnostic tracing and evaluation with either a cheap managed cloud or a free self-hosted stack. |
| Free Tier | ||
| API Access | ||
| Team Features | ||
| Open Source | ||
| Tags | api accessfree tier | free tieropen sourceapi access |
| Visit Groq → | Visit Langfuse → |
Groq
Pros
- + 800-1,000 t/s measured on GPT-OSS 20B, matching the published speed figure within about 15%
- + Per-model speed, price, context and rate limits are all published in one table — rare transparency
- + Document summarisation workload priced under $2 vs $10-20 on frontier APIs for the same task
- + Whisper transcription at $0.04/hr on turbo is the cheapest speech input I have priced
- + OpenAI-compatible API means switching cost is mostly a base URL
Cons
- - Nvidia's ~$20B asset deal (Dec 2025) left Groq restructuring as a neocloud; roadmap risk is real
- - Llama 3.3 70B and 3.1 8B appear priced publicly but 'Contact Sales / Enterprise' in the docs — unresolved conflict
- - 131K context ceiling is a fraction of what frontier APIs offer
- - Open-weight models lag frontier reasoning on my logic smoke tests
- - Self-serve catalogue is a handful of production language models, not a broad library
Langfuse
Pros
- + MIT-licensed core with free, unrestricted self-hosting — only named enterprise features like audit logs and SCIM need a licence key
- + A 5-seat team at 100k traces runs roughly $69/month versus about $420/month for the main closed alternative (Panoply's independent estimate, consistent with my bills)
- + OpenTelemetry-native tracing across OpenAI SDK, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Pydantic AI, Vercel AI SDK, CrewAI and raw OTLP
- + Graduated usage pricing is transparent and cheap: worked examples on the pricing page match my own invoices (200k units on Core = $37/month)
- + Dataset-backed evaluation with the langfuse/experiment-action GitHub step let me gate prompt changes in CI on a real test set
Cons
- - v3 self-hosting needs Postgres, ClickHouse, Redis and S3 where v2 ran on one container — a four-service system to operate
- - Heavy agent traces render slowly in the UI (issue threads #10391 and #9933 match the multi-second loads I measured)
- - Online evaluations score a sample of traffic rather than everything, so rare failure modes can go unscored
- - UI-configured evaluators cannot be triggered programmatically for scheduled pipelines in my setup
- - Owned by ClickHouse, Inc. since January 2026 — licence unchanged so far, but the vendor-independence profile shifted
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is better, Groq or Langfuse?▼
Langfuse scores higher at 4.3/5 vs 4.0/5 for Groq, making it the better-rated option in our comparison.
What is the difference between Groq and Langfuse?▼
Groq: Groq is an AI inference cloud built on its own LPU chips, giving developers and companies fast, low-cost access to run large language models and other AI models in their apps. Langfuse: Langfuse is open-source observability for LLM applications, tracing calls, running evaluations and tracking cost and latency in production.
Is Groq or Langfuse more affordable?▼
Groq starts at €0/mo, Langfuse starts at €0/mo. Check the comparison table above for current pricing.
Stay in the loop
Get weekly updates on the best new AI tools, deals, and comparisons.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.