Alibaba Cloud vs Together AI: Token Pricing, Speed & Intelligence

Full comparison of Alibaba Cloud and Together AI — live token pricing, latency, throughput, context window, strengths, weaknesses, and best use cases. Updated July 2026.

Alibaba Cloud

Qwen — frontier open-weight models with competitive pricing

Alibaba Cloud's Qwen model family spans from budget-tier Qwen-Turbo to the frontier Qwen3-235B MoE reasoning model. Qwen3 models are fully open-weight, making them popular for self-hosted deployments. The API is available via Alibaba's DashScope platform with competitive per-token pricing.

CodingReasoningMultilingualVisionCost-sensitive workloads

Proprietary modelsHosts open weights

Together AI

Open-source model hosting with competitive inference pricing

Together AI specialises in hosting open-weight models including the full Llama family, Mixtral, and DeepSeek variants. They offer live pricing via their public API and support fine-tuning workflows. A popular choice for teams that want open-source flexibility without managing their own GPU infrastructure.

Open-sourceFine-tuningCodingChatCost-efficiency

Open-weight hostHosts open weights

Key metrics

Cheapest input ($/1M)

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Cheapest output ($/1M)

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Peak throughput

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Best latency (TTFT)

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Intelligence score

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Context window

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Live token pricing

Strengths & weaknesses

Alibaba Cloud

Qwen3-235B rivals GPT-4o on reasoning benchmarks

Open-weight models available for self-hosting

Competitive pricing — Qwen-Turbo at $0.05/1M input

Strong multilingual support including Chinese

Vision-language models (Qwen2.5-VL) with strong OCR

API primarily optimised for Asian markets — latency may be higher in US/EU

Less third-party integration support than OpenAI

Documentation quality varies by model version

Together AI

Largest selection of open-weight models

Fine-tuning support for custom model training

OpenAI-compatible API — easy migration

Competitive pricing on Llama 3.x models

Supports 405B parameter models

No proprietary frontier models

Throughput lower than Groq/Cerebras for speed-critical apps

Fine-tuning adds complexity vs. pure inference providers

Key differentiators

Alibaba Cloud

Qwen3-235B is a 235B MoE open-weight model that matches frontier closed models on reasoning benchmarks at a fraction of the cost.

Together AI

The broadest open-weight model catalog with fine-tuning support — ideal for teams that need model customisation without self-hosting.

Frequently asked questions

Alibaba Cloud FAQs

What is the Qwen model family?

Qwen is Alibaba's family of large language models ranging from Qwen-Turbo (budget) to Qwen3-235B (frontier MoE). Qwen3 models support hybrid thinking mode, toggling between fast responses and deep chain-of-thought reasoning.

Are Qwen models open-weight?

Yes. Qwen3 models (including the 235B MoE) are released under open licenses and available on Hugging Face. This makes them popular for self-hosted deployments where data privacy or cost control is a priority.

How does Qwen3-235B compare to GPT-4o?

Qwen3-235B-A22B is a 235B parameter MoE model that activates 22B parameters per token. It scores competitively with GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet on coding and reasoning benchmarks, at significantly lower API cost.

Together AI FAQs

What models does Together AI support?

Together AI hosts 100+ open-weight models including the full Llama 3.x family (8B, 70B, 405B), Mixtral, DeepSeek R1, Qwen, and many others. They also support custom fine-tuned model deployment.

How much does Together AI cost?

Llama 3.3 70B costs $0.88/1M tokens (input and output). Llama 3.1 405B is $3.50/1M tokens. Smaller models like Llama 3.2 11B Vision start at $0.18/1M tokens.

Does Together AI support fine-tuning?

Yes. Together AI offers supervised fine-tuning for Llama and other open-weight models. You can upload training data, run fine-tuning jobs, and deploy the resulting model via their inference API.

Provider resources

Alibaba Cloud

Provider page Website Pricing Docs

Together AI

Provider page Website Pricing Docs

Alibaba Cloud — Qwen — frontier open-weight models with competitive pricing

Qwen3-235B is a 235B MoE open-weight model that matches frontier closed models on reasoning benchmarks at a fraction of the cost.

Together AI — Open-source model hosting with competitive inference pricing

The broadest open-weight model catalog with fine-tuning support — ideal for teams that need model customisation without self-hosting.

Key strengths compared

Alibaba Cloud

▸Qwen3-235B rivals GPT-4o on reasoning benchmarks
▸Open-weight models available for self-hosting
▸Competitive pricing — Qwen-Turbo at $0.05/1M input

Together AI

▸Largest selection of open-weight models
▸Fine-tuning support for custom model training
▸OpenAI-compatible API — easy migration

Provider category context

Alibaba Cloud is a frontier lab, founded in 2009 (AI division 2023). Together AI is a inference api, founded in 2022. Alibaba Cloud as a frontier lab trains and serves its own proprietary models. Together AI as an inference API provider hosts open-weight models — typically offering lower prices for equivalent capability tiers but without access to proprietary frontier models.

How to choose between them

Choose Alibaba Cloud if you need qwen3-235b rivals gpt-4o on reasoning benchmarks. Choose Together AI if you need largest selection of open-weight models. For high-volume production workloads, run a cost comparison using the token pricing table above with your actual prompt/completion token ratio — the cheapest provider depends heavily on your input-to-output token ratio.