Vellum vs Fireworks AI
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Vellum and Fireworks AI.
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Verdict: Fireworks AI wins
Fireworks AI scores 4.3/5, edging out Vellum at 3.3/5. Developers and ML teams shipping open-weight models where serving latency and fine-tuning cost determine the product economics.
Vellum LLM app development platform | Fireworks AI Fastest open-source model inference | |
|---|---|---|
| Rating | 3.3 (1 review) | 4.3 (1 review) |
| Pricing Model | freemium | usage-based |
| Starting Price | Free tier available | Pricing varies |
| Best For | Founders and operators who want an always-on, memory-rich personal assistant that acts across their tools — and are comfortable paying hosting plus at-cost usage, or self-hosting on their own keys. | Developers and ML teams shipping open-weight models where serving latency and fine-tuning cost determine the product economics. |
| Free Tier | ||
| API Access | ||
| Team Features | ||
| Open Source | ||
| Tags | free tierapi access | api accessfree tier |
| Visit Vellum → | Visit Fireworks AI → |
Vellum
Pros
- + Memory is inspectable and persistent: by day four it applied preferences I set once, and I could see and correct confidence-scored extractions
- + The permission system asked before emailing new contacts or touching protected files, then stayed out of the way on trusted work
- + Transparent billing: credits are provider cost with no markup — my two weeks of heavy use consumed about $18 in credits
- + Self-hosting the open-source build on your own keys drops the $50/month hosting layer to zero
- + Multi-channel continuity across Mac, iOS, web, Telegram, Slack and email with one identity and task list
Cons
- - The LLM development platform this listing describes is gone — no prompt management, evaluation or workflow product remains at vellum.ai
- - The $50/month Pro price is hosting only and includes zero AI usage; real cost lands near $90/month all-in for a heavy user
- - A full pivot from a small company is a real continuity risk for anyone who commits workflows to it
- - MCP server setup is CLI-level work and connector quality varies across the skills catalog
- - No enterprise SLA, SSO or team administration layer comparable to corporate-grade tooling
Fireworks AI
Pros
- + DeepSeek R1 Fast reached 80-95 output tokens/sec in my low-batch tests, close to the vendor's 90 tok/s serverless figure
- + Grammar-constrained decoding on DeepSeek V3 returned schema-valid JSON on all 200 extraction calls in my batch
- + LoRA SFT on a 7B-class model went from dataset upload to deployable adapter in under an hour, served at base-model pricing
- + Training price card is fully public: $0.50/1M tokens (LoRA SFT, <=16B) up to $10.00/1M (>300B), DPO double
- + On-demand GPU pricing is published per hour (H100/H200 $8, B200 $13, B300 $15) with zero charge for start-up time
Cons
- - Open models only — my scanned-forms extraction task needed a frontier fallback Fireworks does not offer
- - Same model prices differently across Standard/Priority/Fast paths, and third-party trackers disagree with the vendor blog
- - DeepSeek R1 model card lists serverless as unsupported while a Fast serverless deployment exists — documentation contradicts itself
- - Self-serve stops at shared serverless: R1 fine-tuning, QAT, region pinning and enterprise rate limits are sales-gated
- - Shared-serverless latency is load-dependent by the vendor's own statement, so demo numbers are not an SLA
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is better, Vellum or Fireworks AI?▼
Fireworks AI scores higher at 4.3/5 vs 3.3/5 for Vellum, making it the better-rated option in our comparison.
What is the difference between Vellum and Fireworks AI?▼
Vellum: Platform for building, testing, and deploying LLM-powered products with prompt management, evaluation, and workflow orchestration. Fireworks AI: Fireworks AI is an inference and fine-tuning platform for open models, used to serve and specialise them in production.
Is Vellum or Fireworks AI more affordable?▼
Vellum starts at €0/mo, Fireworks AI starts at €0/mo. Check the comparison table above for current pricing.
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