Cerebras vs SambaNova Cloud
A side-by-side comparison of Cerebras and SambaNova Cloud, two Inference tools, drawn from Ignaite's continuously-verified listings.
Compared from listings verified as of
At a glance
| Attribute | Cerebras | SambaNova Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Inference | Inference |
| Pricing | FREEMIUM | FREEMIUM |
| License | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Deployment | Cloud | Cloud |
| Platforms | Web, API | Web, API |
| Model support | Multi-model | Multi-model |
| Vendor (differs) | Cerebras Systems | SambaNova Systems |
| Capabilities (differs) |
|
|
The honest brief
Cerebras
Wafer-scale CS-3 hardware tops every rival on tokens/sec — fastest pure throughput for agent loops.
- Highest tokens/sec in the market
- Low time-to-first-token (~80-150ms)
- 2-3x faster end-to-end in agent loops
- OpenAI-compatible API, free daily tier
- Smaller model catalog than Groq/Together
- Less mature ecosystem and client libs
- Occasional capacity limits under demand
SambaNova Cloud
One of the few clouds serving Llama 405B in native 16-bit precision at 100+ tokens/sec, not a quantized copy.
- Serves Llama, DeepSeek, Qwen, gpt-oss
- Hundreds of tokens/sec on RDU chips
- OpenAI-compatible API
- Free tier to start
- Open-weight catalog only
- No fine-tuning/custom hosting like GPU clouds
- Smaller model selection than rivals
When to pick which
Both cover Model inference / serving and Multi-model access.
Pick Cerebras if you need Fine-tuning / training.
- Fine-tuning / training (secondary capability)