Cerebras vs Parasail: Token Pricing, Speed & Intelligence
Full comparison of Cerebras and Parasail — live token pricing, latency, throughput, context window, strengths, weaknesses, and best use cases. Rates sourced from public APIs — verify before use.
Cerebras
CS-4 wafer-scale — high-throughput inference on GPT OSS 120B and Qwen 3.8 27B
Cerebras uses wafer-scale silicon (the CS-4 chip) to deliver high-throughput inference significantly faster than conventional GPU systems. The Developer tier provides self-serve access; Enterprise tier adds production capacity, custom model weights, fine-tuning, and dedicated support. Available on AWS Marketplace, OpenRouter, HuggingFace, and Vercel. Check cerebras.ai/pricing for current rates and any free-credit offers.
Parasail
Serverless inference — Kimi K3, GLM-5.3, MiniMax M3, DeepSeek V4, Qwen3.5, Llama 4
Parasail is a serverless LLM inference platform offering a broad catalog of open-weight models including Kimi K3, Kimi K2.6, GLM-5.3, GLM-5.3 Flash, MiniMax M3, DeepSeek V4 Pro/Flash, Qwen3.5 397B-A17B, Qwen3 235B-A22B, Llama 4 Maverick, Llama 3.3 70B, Mistral Small 3.2 24B, MiMo v2.5, Gemma 4 31B, gpt-oss-120b, and gpt-oss-20b. Pricing is published at parasail.io/pricing.
Key metric comparison
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Live token pricing
Strengths and weaknesses
Cerebras
Parasail
Key differentiators
Cerebras CS-4 wafer-scale silicon delivers high-throughput inference on GPT OSS 120B and Qwen 3.8 27B — significantly faster than conventional GPU systems, enabling real-time agentic workflows and interactive AI.
One of the broadest serverless open-weight catalogs available — Kimi K3, GLM-5.3, MiniMax M3, DeepSeek V4, Qwen3.5, and Llama 4 Maverick at competitive per-token rates.
Frequently asked questions
Cerebras FAQs
How fast is Cerebras inference?
Cerebras delivers significantly higher throughput than conventional GPU-based providers on GPT OSS 120B and Qwen 3.8 27B, enabling real-time agentic workflows and interactive AI applications. Check cerebras.ai for current benchmark figures.
What is the Cerebras CS-4 chip?
The CS-4 is Cerebras's latest wafer-scale chip, 58× larger than a GPU. It provides 900,000+ AI cores and massive on-chip SRAM, eliminating the memory bandwidth bottleneck that limits GPU inference speed.
What models does Cerebras support?
Cerebras supports GPT OSS 120B and Qwen 3.8 27B on the Developer tier. Enterprise adds access to all models including production and preview models. Check cerebras.ai/pricing for current rates.
Parasail FAQs
What is Parasail?
Parasail is a serverless LLM inference platform offering a broad catalog of open-weight models. See parasail.io/pricing for current rates and model availability.
What models does Parasail offer?
Parasail's catalog includes Kimi K3, Kimi K2.6, GLM-5.3, GLM-5.3 Flash, MiniMax M3, DeepSeek V4 Pro/Flash, Qwen3.5 397B-A17B, Qwen3 235B-A22B, Llama 4 Maverick, Llama 3.3 70B, Mistral Small 3.2 24B, MiMo v2.5, Gemma 4 31B, gpt-oss-120b, and gpt-oss-20b. See parasail.io/pricing for current rates.
How much does Parasail cost?
As of October 2026: Kimi K3 $3.00/$15.00, Kimi K2.6 $0.75/$3.50, GLM-5.3 $1.40/$4.40, GLM-5.3 Flash $0.15/$0.50, MiniMax M3 $0.30/$1.20, DeepSeek V4 Pro $1.74/$3.48, DeepSeek V4 Flash $0.14/$0.28. See parasail.io/pricing for current rates.
Provider resources
Cerebras — CS-4 wafer-scale — high-throughput inference on GPT OSS 120B and Qwen 3.8 27B
Cerebras uses wafer-scale silicon (the CS-4 chip) to deliver high-throughput inference significantly faster than conventional GPU systems. The Developer tier provides self-serve access; Enterprise tier adds production capacity, custom model weights, fine-tuning, and dedicated support. Available on AWS Marketplace, OpenRouter, HuggingFace, and Vercel. Check cerebras.ai/pricing for current rates and any free-credit offers.
Cerebras CS-4 wafer-scale silicon delivers high-throughput inference on GPT OSS 120B and Qwen 3.8 27B — significantly faster than conventional GPU systems, enabling real-time agentic workflows and interactive AI.
Parasail — Serverless inference — Kimi K3, GLM-5.3, MiniMax M3, DeepSeek V4, Qwen3.5, Llama 4
Parasail is a serverless LLM inference platform offering a broad catalog of open-weight models including Kimi K3, Kimi K2.6, GLM-5.3, GLM-5.3 Flash, MiniMax M3, DeepSeek V4 Pro/Flash, Qwen3.5 397B-A17B, Qwen3 235B-A22B, Llama 4 Maverick, Llama 3.3 70B, Mistral Small 3.2 24B, MiMo v2.5, Gemma 4 31B, gpt-oss-120b, and gpt-oss-20b. Pricing is published at parasail.io/pricing.
One of the broadest serverless open-weight catalogs available — Kimi K3, GLM-5.3, MiniMax M3, DeepSeek V4, Qwen3.5, and Llama 4 Maverick at competitive per-token rates.
Key strengths compared
Cerebras
- GPT OSS 120B: high-throughput inference on CS-4 wafer-scale silicon
- Qwen 3.8 27B: fast efficient-tier inference
- CS-4 chip: 58× larger than GPUs, purpose-built for AI inference
- Limited model selection vs. Together AI or Fireworks
- No vision or multimodal support
Parasail
- Broad open-weight model catalog: Kimi K3, GLM-5.3, MiniMax M3, DeepSeek V4, Qwen3.5, Llama 4
- Competitive serverless pricing across all tiers
- Kimi K3 and Kimi K2.6 availability — rare outside Chinese providers
- Newer platform — less battle-tested than Together AI or Fireworks
- No proprietary frontier models
Key weaknesses compared
Cerebras
- Limited model selection vs. Together AI or Fireworks
- No vision or multimodal support
- No fine-tuning on Developer tier
Parasail
- Newer platform — less battle-tested than Together AI or Fireworks
- No proprietary frontier models
- Smaller community and ecosystem
Provider category context
Cerebras is a inference api, founded in 2016. Parasail is a inference api, founded in 2023. Both are inference api providers — the comparison is primarily about pricing, model selection, and feature differentiation within the same tier.
How to choose between them
Both Cerebras and Parasail host open-weight models. The key differentiators are latency, throughput, and which specific model versions each provider offers. Check the speed metrics above — inference API providers often differ significantly on tokens-per-second for the same model. Pricing is typically competitive between them; availability of specific model versions (e.g., Llama 3.1 405B, DeepSeek V3) may be the deciding factor.