Llama 4 Maverick vs Grok 4.3
Llama 4 Maverick and Grok 4.3 sit at opposite ends of the price/capability curve. Maverick is a mixture-of-experts model from Meta (17B active params, 128 experts) launched April 2025, priced for scale. Grok 4.3 is xAI's newer reasoning model, released April 2026, built for agentic workflows with configurable reasoning effort. Both are available on OpenKey with one API key and a flat 3% fee over provider list price — the question is which one fits your workload and budget.
Spec vs spec
| Spec | Llama 4 Maverick | Grok 4.3 |
|---|---|---|
| Context window | 1.0M | 1M |
| Max output | 16K | — |
| Input modalities | text, image | text, image, file |
| Output modalities | text | text |
| Knowledge cutoff | Aug 31, 2024 | — |
| Released | Apr 5, 2025 | Apr 30, 2026 |
| Reasoning | — | optional |
Pricing
Per 1M tokens. Provider price plus the flat 3% fee — the sum is what you pay.
meta-llama/llama-4-maverick
Input · 1M tokens
$0.150 + 3%$0.154
Output · 1M tokens
$0.600 + 3%$0.618
FEE — FLAT, EVERY MODEL3%
x-ai/grok-4.3
Input · 1M tokens
$1.25 + 3%$1.29
Output · 1M tokens
$2.50 + 3%$2.58
Cache read · 1M tokens
$0.200 + 3%$0.206
FEE — FLAT, EVERY MODEL3%
One workload, priced on both
10M input + 2M output tokens at each model's price, flat 3% fee included.
meta-llama/llama-4-maverickCheaper
$2.78
$2.70 provider + 3%
x-ai/grok-4.3
$18.03
$17.50 provider + 3%
Benchmarks
Design Arena categories where both models have results. Higher Elo and lower rank win.
| Llama 4 Maverick | Grok 4.3 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Category | Elo | Rank | Elo | Rank |
| 3D | 976 | #91 | 1202 | #43 |
| Code | 929 | #102 | 1243 | #31 |
| Data viz | 926 | #100 | 1234 | #35 |
| Game dev | 903 | #103 | 1242 | #34 |
| UI components | 955 | #94 | 1250 | #31 |
| Websites | 914 | #105 | 1244 | #31 |
Head-to-head preference voting. How we filter and rank
Pricing math
Provider list price: Maverick runs $0.15/M input and $0.60/M output. Grok 4.3 runs $1.25/M input and $2.50/M output — roughly 8x the input cost. On OpenKey, add the flat 3% fee: Maverick becomes $0.1545/M input and $0.618/M output; Grok 4.3 becomes $1.2875/M input and $2.575/M output ($1.25 × 1.03, $2.50 × 1.03).
For a concrete workload — 10M input tokens plus 2M output tokens — Maverick costs $2.70 total. The same workload on Grok 4.3 costs $17.50, about 6.5x more. Grok 4.3 also supports prompt caching at $0.20/M for cached reads, which Maverick doesn't offer, so repeated-context workloads narrow the gap somewhat if you're hitting cache.
Coding and agentic performance
This isn't close. Artificial Analysis puts Grok 4.3's coding index at 42.2 against Maverick's 16.3, and its agentic index at 24.1 against Maverick's 1.3 — nearly 19x higher. Grok 4.3 also has dedicated Design Arena results in the agents arena (webapps elo 1194, rank 14; godotgamedev elo 1134, rank 16; mobileapps elo 1146, rank 26), a category Maverick has no scores in at all.
On the shared models arena, Grok 4.3 leads across every category: uicomponent (1250 vs 955), website (1244 vs 914), codecategories (1243 vs 929), gamedev (1242 vs 903), dataviz (1234 vs 926), and 3d (1202 vs 976). If you're building agents that write and execute code, Grok 4.3 is the only realistic choice of the two.
Context and modality
Maverick offers a 1,048,576-token context window; Grok 4.3 offers 1,000,000 — Maverick's is about 1.05x larger, a negligible practical difference. Maverick caps output at 16,384 tokens; Grok 4.3 has no listed max completion cap in this data.
Modality differs more meaningfully: Maverick accepts text and image input, output text only. Grok 4.3 accepts text, image, and file input, also outputting text only. If your pipeline needs to hand raw files (not just images) to the model, Grok 4.3 covers that and Maverick doesn't.
Reasoning control
Grok 4.3 ships with configurable reasoning: effort levels of high, medium, low, and none, reasoning enabled by default at "low" effort. That means you can dial cost and latency up or down per request by adjusting effort — useful if some calls need deep reasoning and others don't. Maverick has no reasoning parameter at all; it's a straight instruct model. If your workload mixes simple lookups with hard multi-step problems, Grok 4.3's effort toggle gives you a lever Maverick simply doesn't have.
Which model for which job
| Use case | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| High-volume text generation on a budget | Llama 4 Maverick | $2.70 vs $17.50 for the same 10M-in/2M-out workload |
| Agentic coding / autonomous dev tasks | Grok 4.3 | Agentic index of 24.1 vs Maverick's 1.3 |
| Web app / UI generation | Grok 4.3 | Design Arena uicomponent elo 1250 vs Maverick's 955 |
| File-based document processing | Grok 4.3 | Only Grok 4.3 accepts file inputs directly |
| Mixed-difficulty request routing | Grok 4.3 | Adjustable reasoning effort (high/medium/low/none) lets you tune cost per call |
| Large-context batch summarization at scale | Llama 4 Maverick | Near-identical 1,048,576-token context at a fraction of the price |
Questions
- How much more expensive is Grok 4.3 than Llama 4 Maverick?
- On a 10M-input/2M-output workload, Grok 4.3 costs $17.50 versus $2.70 for Llama 4 Maverick — about 6.5x more. The input price ratio alone is roughly 0.12 (Maverick's input price is about 12% of Grok 4.3's).
- Which model has a bigger context window?
- Llama 4 Maverick has a 1,048,576-token context window versus Grok 4.3's 1,000,000 — a context ratio of about 1.05x, meaning they're essentially equivalent for long-document work.
- Is Grok 4.3 actually better at coding?
- Yes, by a wide margin. Artificial Analysis scores Grok 4.3's coding index at 42.2 against Maverick's 16.3, and on Design Arena's codecategories benchmark Grok 4.3 scores 1243 elo (rank 31) versus Maverick's 929 elo (rank 102).
- Does Grok 4.3 support prompt caching?
- Yes — Grok 4.3 lists a cache read price of $0.20/M tokens on the provider side, which Llama 4 Maverick does not offer. That can meaningfully cut cost on workloads that reuse the same context repeatedly.