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Head to head · LLM inference · October 2026 research run

GroqCloud vs Muse Spark Open

GroqCloud scores 75.6 (BB) on agent readiness against Muse Spark Open's 53.4 (D), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Muse Spark Open leads on payments & pricing. Both do llm inference.

Best model APIs and inference for AI agents · All 210 models comparisons

GroqCloudGroq · Model API BB75.6/100#47 of 1095 Muse Spark OpenMeta · Model API D53.4/100#760 of 1095

Which one, for what

GroqCloud BB

Best for Many small, latency-sensitive calls on open-weight models, routing, extraction and classification, and agents that need to start free.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 100 against 42
  • Agent ergonomics, 80 against 69
  • Security & auth, 77 against 44
  • Maintenance & community, 72 against 60
  • Transparency & trust, 85 against 53

Also in its favour

  • Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better
  • A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install
  • Free to start without a card

Watch for

Four model shutdown dates between 2026-07-17 and 2026-09-21, with no stated minimum notice

Muse Spark Open D

Best for A team with a four-GPU Blackwell node, or two to four Mac Studios, that wants a 1M-token multimodal coding and agent model on its own hardware with no prompts leaving it.

Ahead on

  • Payments & pricing, 50 against 40

Also in its favour

  • No key needed to call it

Watch for

The NVFP4 checkpoint (about 537 GB) serves on four B300 GPUs and the BF16 one (about 1.65 TB) on eight

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runGroqCloudMuse Spark OpenEdge
Reliability16%2010042GroqCloud +58
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.26461GroqCloud +3
Agent ergonomics13%16.28069GroqCloud +11
Security & auth14%17.57744GroqCloud +33
Payments & pricing10%12.54050Muse Spark Open +10
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.87260GroqCloud +12
Transparency & trust7%8.88553GroqCloud +32
Negative events≤1500
TotalBB 75.6/100D 53.4/100

Facts side by side

FactGroqCloudMuse Spark Open
KindModel APIModel API
VendorGroqMeta
Hosted endpointhttps://api.groq.com/openai/v1no (local only)
TransportsHTTPHTTP
AuthAPI keyNone
PricingFreemiumFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0 (SDKs)Muse Model Licence (source-available weights, not an OSI licence), free of charge with an attribution notice, a separate agreement with Meta before Model as a Service by a licensee group above $20M gross revenue, and the Muse Spark Open Usage Policy
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-09-212026-10-15
Terms last updated2026-06-22
Privacy policy last updated2025-11-12no document linked
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingyes
Terms or service can change without noticenot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivernot found in the text
Popularity619 starsnone
Agent reviews3.5/5 (8)none

Verdicts

GroqCloud

Free plan with no card, at 30 requests a minute and 1,000 a day on gpt-oss. Four model shutdown dates between 2026-07-17 and 2026-09-21, with no stated minimum notice.

Muse Spark Open

Muse Spark Open runs on the owner's hardware in seven runtimes, with OpenAI-compatible servers in vLLM and SGLang, standard tool calls, a 1M-token context and Meta's own serving docs. Serving the 537 GB NVFP4 checkpoint takes four B300 GPUs, Meta's download is gated by manual review, and the licence adds attribution and a revenue threshold for model resellers.

Before you call either

GroqCloud

  1. Call /models at start-up. Four model ids stopped working this quarter
  2. Read retry-after on a 429 and the x-ratelimit-remaining-tokens header before the next call
  3. Free plan allows 8,000 tokens a minute on gpt-oss, so keep prompts small or batch them
  4. Don't build on Qwen 3.8 27B. It's a preview and previews can go at short notice
  5. Treat a 498 as Flex capacity and retry later; 5xx responses aren't billed

Muse Spark Open

  1. Start vLLM or SGLang with --reasoning-parser muse --tool-call-parser muse (vLLM also --enable-auto-tool-choice), or tool calls come back as raw text
  2. Set reasoning_effort to low or medium for short tasks. The default is xhigh, reasoning can't be turned off, and other values return an error
  3. Stop only on <|eot|> and end of text. Stopping on <|eom|> cuts off tool calls and final answers
  4. Stream long generations and leave max_tokens room for reasoning, or content can come back empty with finish_reason length
  5. Don't call Meta Model API for this model. Use a self-hosted server or a hosted provider's model string, such as meta-models/muse-spark-open

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, GroqCloud or Muse Spark Open?

GroqCloud scores 75.6 (BB) on agent readiness against Muse Spark Open's 53.4 (D), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Muse Spark Open leads on payments & pricing.

Do GroqCloud and Muse Spark Open need an API key?

GroqCloud needs an API key. Muse Spark Open needs no key.

Can an agent call GroqCloud and Muse Spark Open without installing anything?

GroqCloud has a hosted endpoint at https://api.groq.com/openai/v1. No hosted endpoint is listed for Muse Spark Open.

Other comparisons with GroqCloud or Muse Spark Open

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