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Best Open Source LLMs (2026)

Top open-source and open-weight large language models that can be self-hosted or accessed through third-party providers at competitive prices.

Why Llama 4 Maverick is Best for Open Source LLMs

Llama 4 Maverick leads our open-source rankings by combining near-frontier performance with fully open weights. It can be self-hosted for data privacy or accessed through third-party providers at a fraction of proprietary model costs. The open ecosystem means fine-tuning, quantization, and custom deployments are all possible, making it the most versatile option for teams that need control over their AI infrastructure.

Cost Estimate

For a typical open-source deployment (~100M tokens/month via API, 60% input / 40% output), the cheapest qualifying model (Phi-4) costs approximately $9.50/month. The most capable model may cost more but delivers higher quality results.

Price vs Quality for Open Source LLMs

Alibaba
Deepseek
Meta
Microsoft
Mistral

Top 5 Models Compared

RankModelProviderInput $/MOutput $/MArena ELOSpeed (tok/s)
#1Llama 4 MaverickMeta$0.150$0.600129090
#2Llama 4 ScoutMeta$0.080$0.3001250110
#3DeepSeek V3DeepSeek$0.200$0.770128085
#4DeepSeek R1DeepSeek$0.700$2.50131045
#5Qwen 2.5 MaxAlibaba$0.160$0.640126080
#1Llama 4 Maverick
Meta
ELO 1290
Input

$0.150/M

Output

$0.600/M

VisionJSON ModeFunctionsMultimodal
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#2Llama 4 Scout
Meta
ELO 1250
Input

$0.080/M

Output

$0.300/M

VisionJSON ModeFunctionsMultimodal
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#3DeepSeek V3
DeepSeek
ELO 1280
Input

$0.200/M

Output

$0.770/M

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#4DeepSeek R1
DeepSeek
ELO 1310
Input

$0.700/M

Output

$2.50/M

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#5Qwen 2.5 Max
Alibaba
ELO 1260
Input

$0.160/M

Output

$0.640/M

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#6Mistral Large
Mistral
ELO 1245
Input

$0.500/M

Output

$1.50/M

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#7Phi-4
Microsoft
ELO 1150
Input

$0.065/M

Output

$0.140/M

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