Baseten vs Fireworks AI
Both Baseten and Fireworks let you run open-source and custom AI models in the cloud, but Baseten’s enterprise-grade platform wins when performance, reliability, and transparency matter.
How Baseten is different than Fireworks AI
Faster performance
The Baseten Inference Stack includes modality-specific runtimes optimized for the lowest latency and highest throughput. Baseten's forward deployed engineers work as an extension of your team to optimize model deployments for your performance targets — no consultancy fees or gating through the sales team.
Higher reliability
Baseten uses Multi-cloud Capacity Management to power four to five nines uptime, regardless of capacity constraints or hardware failures. By comparison, Fireworks does not publish uptime for its dedicated deployments, and many of its model APIs hover around ~99% uptime, which can mean noticeable downtime across the year.
More transparency
Baseten's model performance is never a black box. Baseten's forward deployed engineers work as an extension of your team to optimize your models with complete transparency. You own all of the model optimizations, and can always take them elsewhere. Pricing is consumption-based, not based on always-on commitments.
Model performance
Custom Inference Stack
Optimized runtimes per model modality
White-glove engineering support
Optimized implementations of popular models
The fastest speculation engine
Support for different inference frameworks
Custom fork of TensorRT-LLM
Works with NVIDIA to improve performance
Custom inference kernels
Structured outputs and tool use
Custom Inference Stack
Optimized runtimes per model modality
White-glove engineering support
Optimized implementations of popular models
The fastest speculation engine
Support for different inference frameworks
Custom fork of TensorRT-LLM
Works with NVIDIA to improve performance
Custom inference kernels
Structured outputs and tool use
Inference-optimized Infrastructure
Multi-cloud capacity management
> 99.99% uptime
Unlimited autoscaling
Supports many different cloud providers
On-demand compute
Optimized cold starts
Intelligent request routing
Protocol flexibility
Early access to the latest-generation GPUs
Support for any model type
Multi-cloud capacity management
> 99.99% uptime
Unlimited autoscaling
Supports many different cloud providers
On-demand compute
Optimized cold starts
Intelligent request routing
Protocol flexibility
Early access to the latest-generation GPUs
Support for any model type
Security and enterprise-readiness
SOC 2 Type II
HIPAA
GDPR
Self-hosting
Self-hosted with spillover capacity
Single-tenant clusters
Full control over data residency
Volume discounts on compute
Transparent optimization stack
Hands-on control per deployment
SOC 2 Type II
HIPAA
GDPR
Self-hosting
Self-hosted with spillover capacity
Single-tenant clusters
Full control over data residency
Volume discounts on compute
Transparent optimization stack
Hands-on control per deployment
Developer experience
Manage 100s to 1000s of models
Fine-grained logging and observability
Deploy single models
Framework for compound AI systems
Deploy custom Docker servers
Manage 100s to 1000s of models
Fine-grained logging and observability
Deploy single models
Framework for compound AI systems
Deploy custom Docker servers
Product support
Dedicated Deployments
Pre-optimized Model APIs
Training
Proprietary model evaluation protocol
Dedicated Deployments
Pre-optimized Model APIs
Training
Proprietary model evaluation protocol
When you should use Baseten or Fireworks AI
Choose Baseten for:
- Mission-critical reliability
- Flexible autoscaling without limits
- End-to-end AI lifecycle support
Choose Fireworks AI for:
- Shared endpoint diversity
- Workloads with fixed scaling needs
- In-house LLM benchmarking
Our team spent weeks researching and vetting inference providers. It was a thorough process and we confidently believe Baseten was a clear winner. Baseten has helped us abstract away so much of the complexity of AI model deployments and MLOps. On Baseten, things just work out of the box - this has saved us countless engineering hours. It’s made a huge difference in our productivity as a team - most of our engineers have experience now in training and deploying models on Baseten. Every time we start an ML project, we think about how quickly we can get things going through Baseten.
Baseten cut our P95 latency by 80% across the dozens of fine-tuned embedding models that power core features in Superhuman's AI-native email app. Superhuman is all about saving time. With Baseten, we're delivering a faster product for our customers while reducing engineering time spent on infrastructure.
Loïc Houssier,
CTO
Our team spent weeks researching and vetting inference providers. It was a thorough process and we confidently believe Baseten was a clear winner. Baseten has helped us abstract away so much of the complexity of AI model deployments and MLOps. On Baseten, things just work out of the box - this has saved us countless engineering hours. It’s made a huge difference in our productivity as a team - most of our engineers have experience now in training and deploying models on Baseten. Every time we start an ML project, we think about how quickly we can get things going through Baseten.
Baseten cut our P95 latency by 80% across the dozens of fine-tuned embedding models that power core features in Superhuman's AI-native email app. Superhuman is all about saving time. With Baseten, we're delivering a faster product for our customers while reducing engineering time spent on infrastructure.
Talk to our team
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