Groq vs Together AI
The question that decides it: Is perceived output speed your product differentiator, or do you need catalog breadth, fine-tuning and a HIPAA BAA?
Our verdict
Groq when output speed is the feature your users notice — streaming chat, voice, anything interactive. Together AI when you need catalog breadth, cheap fine-tuning, a dedicated-GPU growth path, or a HIPAA BAA.
Why
These are both single-source inference providers, not gateways. Neither offers cross-provider routing, load balancing or failover, which means an outage at either has no in-platform fallback. If uptime matters, you want one of these behind a gateway that can fail over to the other, rather than either one alone. That is the most important architectural point about both.
Groq's case is speed, and it is not marginal. Up to 1,000 tokens per second on GPT-OSS-20B on its own LPU hardware is the highest published output speed in this catalog, and per-token prices are very low — gpt-oss-120b at $0.15 input and $0.60 output per million tokens. For streaming chat, voice agents or anything where the user watches text appear, that is a difference they can feel. Groq also makes zero data retention self-serve for every customer, globally or per feature, with no retention of inference data by default, which is a stronger default than most.
Together AI's case is breadth and growth path. 200+ open-weight models across text, vision, image, video, audio and embeddings under one OpenAI-compatible API, against Groq's open-weight-only catalog with no published model count. Fine-tuning is inexpensive from $0.48 per million tokens with a $4 job minimum, and there is a documented path from serverless to dedicated endpoints, GPU clusters and provisioned throughput as volume grows. Together also has HIPAA BAAs in place with partners, where Groq has no documented BAA.
The compliance gap decides this for regulated buyers. Groq retains data in US Google Cloud buckets with no EU residency option and no documented HIPAA BAA. Together has SOC 2 Type 2 completed, a public trust center and partner BAAs — though its GDPR posture, EU residency and zero-retention specifics are not documented on any vendor page found, so it is better rather than complete. Neither is a good answer if contractual EU residency is a hard requirement.
Which one, concretely
Choose Groq if
- Output speed is a feature your users perceive — streaming, voice, interactive UX
- You want the lowest per-token prices on open-weight models
- You want self-serve zero data retention with no retention by default
- You need speech-to-text and text-to-speech endpoints alongside chat
Choose Together AI if
- You need catalog breadth — 200+ models across six modalities
- You want cheap fine-tuning from $0.48 per 1M tokens
- You need a documented path to dedicated endpoints and GPU clusters
- You need a HIPAA BAA, which Groq does not document
What catches people out
- Both are single-source providers with no failover. Put a gateway in front if availability matters.
- Groq has no EU residency option and all retained data sits in US Google Cloud buckets, with no documented HIPAA BAA.
- Groq's free-tier rate limits are tight — around 30 requests/min on gpt-oss-120b — and some OpenAI parameters are unsupported.
- Together publishes no free tier and third-party reporting says new accounts need a prepaid minimum balance.
- Together's GDPR posture, EU residency and zero-retention specifics are not documented on any vendor page found.
- Both are multi-tenant serverless by default, so throughput varies with neighbouring load, and Together can rotate or deprecate model IDs.
Side by side
These two publish the same answer on every field below. Every figure links to the vendor page it came from. Blank values read Not published rather than No — silence from a vendor is not a negative answer.
| Field | Groq | Together AI |
|---|---|---|
| Ease of leaving Derived score, higher is easier | 32/68 Hard to leave | 32/68 Hard to leave |
| What kind of product Category | Inference provider | Inference provider |
| Who runs it Deployment model | Managed only | Managed only |
| Licence Licence | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Models available Models available | 6–16 | 110–200 |
| Model providers reachable Upstream providers | Not published | Not published |
| Requests per second ceiling Throughput | 1,000 rps | Not published |
| SOC 2 audited SOC 2 audited | Yes | Yes |
| Will sign a HIPAA agreement HIPAA BAA | Not published | Yes |
| Does not retain your data Zero data retention | Yes | Not published |
| Can keep data in the EU EU data residency | No | Not published |
| Batch processing Batch processing | Yes | Yes |
| Content guardrails Content guardrails | Not published | Yes |
| Embeddings Embeddings | Not published | Yes |
| Speech and audio Speech and audio | Yes | Yes |
| Image generation Image generation | Not published | Yes |
Verified 3 days ago for Groq and Verified 3 days ago for Together AI. Want more fields, or a third option in the mix? Open these two in the full comparison tool.
Common questions
Is Groq actually faster than Together AI?
Groq publishes the highest output speeds in this catalog — up to 1,000 tokens per second on GPT-OSS-20B on its own LPU hardware. Together does not publish comparable throughput figures. For streaming or interactive use where users watch text appear, Groq's advantage is real and perceptible.
Can I get a HIPAA BAA from either?
Together AI has HIPAA BAAs in place with partners and SOC 2 Type 2 completed. Groq has no documented HIPAA BAA, and all its retained data sits in US Google Cloud buckets with no EU residency option.
Do I need a gateway in front of these?
If availability matters, yes. Both are single-source providers with no cross-provider routing, load balancing or failover, so an outage at either has no in-platform fallback. A gateway such as LiteLLM, Portkey or OpenRouter can fail over between them.