GPT-5 vs Llama 4
2026 - Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Llama 4 is open-weights - free to self-host with no API costs. GPT-5 requires paid API access.
- •Llama 4 has a 10M context window - 78x larger than GPT-5's 128K. Better for long documents and large codebases.
- •Llama 4 is open-source: fine-tune it, self-host it, or use any inference provider. GPT-5 is closed-source.
Specs comparison
| GPT-5 | Llama 4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | Meta |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | 128K | ✓10M |
| Input / 1M tokens | $10.00 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $30.00 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2025-06 | 2025-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | GPT-5 | Llama 4 |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU | - | ~85% |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts.
Strengths
GPT-5
- ✓Strong general-purpose reasoning
- ✓Excellent multimodal understanding
- ✓Broad domain knowledge
- ✓Consistent instruction following
- ✓Widely supported by third-party tools
Llama 4
- ✓Fully open weights - no usage restrictions
- ✓10M context in Llama 4 Scout variant
- ✓Native multimodal support
- ✓Strong performance relative to size
- ✓Enormous ecosystem of community tools and fine-tunes
Which should you choose?
Choose GPT-5 if you need...
- →General-purpose API integrations
- →Multimodal applications
- →Complex reasoning tasks
- →Enterprise deployments
Choose Llama 4 if you need...
- →Self-hosted and on-premise deployments
- →Privacy-sensitive workloads
- →Custom fine-tuning
- →Researchers and open-source builders