Best-value multimodal agentic model — GPT-5.5-tier smarts, video/audio/PDF in.
89
Coding
88
Writing
90
Research
90
Images
72
Value
90
Long Context
Use this when
Agentic tool-use and multimodal reasoning at aggressive pricing
Skip this if
You need frontier-ceiling reasoning or a mature developer ecosystem — Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 lead both.
Pricing
$1.25/1M in
$4.25/1M out
Context
1.0M tokens
Speed
Balanced
v1.0 launched April 8, 2026 alongside Llama 5; v1.1 (July 9) opened the paid API; v1.2 (Aug 5) is coding-focused and powers Muse Code. Built with 'over an order of magnitude less' pretraining compute than Llama 4 Maverick. Cache hits $0.15/1M.
Pricing moves, ranking shifts, and capability updates.
New ModelApr 8, 2026
Llama 5 released — enters the ranked catalog once a verified hosted price is live
Meta released Llama 5 on April 8, 2026: fully open weights, ~600B parameters, a 5M-token context window (the largest of any 2026 frontier release), and a Recursive Self-Improvement capability that lets it re-check its own reasoning mid-task. Hosted API deployments (Together AI, Fireworks, Groq, Bedrock) were announced but no major host had published verified per-token Llama 5 pricing as of August 6, 2026 — so, per our no-guessed-numbers policy, Llama 5 is tracked here and joins the ranked catalog when a real price lands. Meta's closed sibling Muse Spark, which does have verified pricing, has a full model page.
Muse Spark is best for agentic tool-use and multimodal reasoning at aggressive pricing. It is a strong fit when that workflow matters more than the tradeoffs around balanced pricing and balanced speed.
When should I avoid Muse Spark?
You need frontier-ceiling reasoning or a mature developer ecosystem — Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 lead both.
What is a cheaper alternative to Muse Spark?
Google: Gemma 2 9B is the lower-cost option to compare first when you want a similar workflow fit with less token spend.
What is a faster alternative to Muse Spark?
Muse Spark is the better pick when response time matters more than maximum depth or premium quality.
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