Modal vs Together
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Modal and Together.
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Verdict: Modal wins
Modal scores 4.4/5, edging out Together at 4.3/5. Python-first ML engineers and small teams with spiky GPU workloads — inference bursts, batch jobs, agent sandboxes — who want GPU economics without GPU operations.
Modal Run AI workloads serverlessly in Python | Together Ultra-fast scalable AI model development platform | |
|---|---|---|
| Rating | 4.4 (1 review) | 4.3 (1 review) |
| Pricing Model | freemium | usage-based |
| Starting Price | Free tier available | Pricing varies |
| Best For | Python-first ML engineers and small teams with spiky GPU workloads — inference bursts, batch jobs, agent sandboxes — who want GPU economics without GPU operations. | Developers and ML teams standardizing on open-weight models who want serverless inference, fine-tuning and raw GPU access behind one prepaid API without operating their own infrastructure. |
| Free Tier | ||
| API Access | ||
| Team Features | ||
| Open Source | ||
| Tags | free tierapi access | team featuresapi access |
| Visit Modal → | Visit Together → |
Modal
Pros
- + Slim-image containers accepted work in ~1-3s from zero in my tests; heavyweight torch+7B init ran 15-25s, consistent with the docs' seconds-to-minutes range
- + Per-second metering reconciled against my own container-uptime arithmetic within a percent or two over several weeks
- + Fan-out to 50 workers took one decorator and no queue plumbing; scaling up and back was invisible in the code
- + Full public rate card: H100 $0.001097/sec down to T4 $0.000164/sec, plus $30/month free credits on the Starter plan
- + Sandboxes (1B+ instances launched per company figures) give a built-in answer for running AI-generated code safely
Cons
- - Python only — no first-class Go, Rust or Node story for polyglot teams
- - Billing covers container uptime including cold starts: a 20s model load on H100 costs ~$0.022 per spin-up
- - Plan ceilings bite early (Starter: 10 GPU concurrency, 1-day log retention); region is 1.15-1.75x and non-preemptible/Sandboxes 3x
- - No model catalogue — checkpoint serving and inference frameworks are your own code
- - HIPAA, SSO and audit logs are Enterprise-tier, pushing regulated workloads into a sales process
Together
Pros
- + LoRA fine-tuning from $0.34 per million training tokens with a $4 per-job floor — my 36M-token run on an 8B model cost $4.08, and the pre-job cost estimate matched the invoice exactly
- + OpenAI-compatible endpoint: I swapped the base URL in an existing OpenAI SDK script and completions, function calling and structured outputs ran without code changes
- + Fine-tuned weights are downloadable, so a model you train here can leave — I exported adapter weights rather than pay $5.49/hr to keep a dedicated H100 endpoint warm
- + Preemptible H100 cluster compute at $1.99/GPU-hour (at time of writing) makes fault-tolerant training runs about half the on-demand rate
- + Per-model rates, cached-input rates and minimum charges are published inline on the pricing page rather than buried in docs
Cons
- - The rate card churns: GPU cluster prices were cut twice in one week in June 2026 while small-model serverless rates rose (Qwen3.5 9B went $0.10 to $0.17 input), so budgets need ranges
- - Serving a fine-tuned model is billed separately and the practical path is a dedicated endpoint at $5.49/hr list for H100 — a $4 training job can cost four figures per month to serve
- - Prepaid credits only at the self-serve level: hit a zero balance and API access is suspended instead of billing an overage
- - No serverless embedding, rerank or moderation models at time of writing — those require dedicated model inference
- - Five parallel meters (serverless tokens, batch tokens, training tokens, GPU-hours, PTU-minutes) on one credit balance make cost attribution work for any finance team
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is better, Modal or Together?▼
Modal scores higher at 4.4/5 vs 4.3/5 for Together, making it the better-rated option in our comparison.
What is the difference between Modal and Together?▼
Modal: Modal runs Python code on cloud CPUs and GPUs without managing infrastructure, used for AI inference, training and batch data jobs. Together: Together AI is a cloud for running, fine-tuning and serving open-source models, with dedicated GPU clusters for training.
Is Modal or Together more affordable?▼
Modal starts at €0/mo, Together starts at €0/mo. Check the comparison table above for current pricing.
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