Grok 4.1 Fast vs Llama 4 Maverick

Across our 12-test suite, Grok 4.1 Fast wins on every benchmark where scores differ except safety calibration. Here's the test-by-test breakdown:

Strategic Analysis (5 vs 2): This is the widest gap in the comparison. Grok 4.1 Fast ties for 1st among 54 models; Llama 4 Maverick ranks 44th of 54. For nuanced tradeoff reasoning with real data — business analysis, risk assessment, technical decision-making — the gap is practically significant.

Long Context (5 vs 4): Grok 4.1 Fast ties for 1st among 55 models; Llama 4 Maverick ranks 38th. Grok also has a 2M token context window vs Maverick's ~1M tokens, doubling the document length it can process. For retrieval accuracy at 30K+ tokens, Grok 4.1 Fast is meaningfully stronger.

Faithfulness (5 vs 4): Grok 4.1 Fast ties for 1st among 55; Llama 4 Maverick ranks 34th. Grok is less likely to hallucinate when summarizing or extracting from source material — critical for RAG pipelines and document QA.

Structured Output (5 vs 4): Grok 4.1 Fast ties for 1st among 54; Llama 4 Maverick ranks 26th. JSON schema compliance matters for any downstream data pipeline.

Multilingual (5 vs 4): Grok 4.1 Fast ties for 1st among 55; Llama 4 Maverick ranks 36th. A one-point gap here reflects meaningfully lower non-English output quality from Maverick.

Agentic Planning (4 vs 3): Grok 4.1 Fast ranks 16th of 54; Llama 4 Maverick ranks 42nd. For goal decomposition and failure recovery in automated workflows, Grok 4.1 Fast is substantially more capable.

Tool Calling (4 vs not scored): Grok 4.1 Fast scored 4 (rank 18 of 54). Llama 4 Maverick's tool calling test hit a 429 rate limit during our testing on 2026-04-13 — noted as likely transient — so no score is available for direct comparison. Grok 4.1 Fast's 4/5 puts it in the upper-middle tier for function selection and argument accuracy.

Creative Problem Solving (4 vs 3): Grok 4.1 Fast ranks 9th of 54; Llama 4 Maverick ranks 30th.

Classification (4 vs 3): Grok 4.1 Fast ties for 1st among 53; Llama 4 Maverick ranks 31st.

Constrained Rewriting (4 vs 3): Grok 4.1 Fast ranks 6th of 53; Llama 4 Maverick ranks 31st.

Persona Consistency (5 vs 5): The only tie. Both models tie for 1st among 53 tested — equally reliable for chatbot personas and injection resistance.

Safety Calibration (1 vs 2): Llama 4 Maverick's only win. It ranks 12th of 55 (score 2); Grok 4.1 Fast ranks 32nd (score 1). Neither model scores above the field median of 2 — safety calibration is a weak area for both, though Maverick is comparatively less likely to refuse legitimate requests or permit harmful ones.

Grok 4.1 Fast costs $0.20/MTok input and $0.50/MTok output. Llama 4 Maverick costs $0.15/MTok input and $0.60/MTok output. At typical output-heavy workloads, Grok 4.1 Fast is actually cheaper on the output side — $0.10/MTok less per output token. At 1M output tokens/month, that's $100 saved with Grok 4.1 Fast. At 10M tokens, $1,000. At 100M tokens, $10,000. Llama 4 Maverick has a $0.05/MTok input advantage, which matters for read-heavy, low-output tasks like classification or document ingestion. If your workload is 70%+ output tokens — agentic pipelines, long-form generation, chatbots — Grok 4.1 Fast is both cheaper and higher-scoring. Only pure input-heavy workloads (batch classification, RAG retrieval preprocessing) favor Maverick's pricing.

Choose Grok 4.1 Fast if you need strong strategic reasoning, long-document processing (up to 2M tokens), reliable structured outputs for data pipelines, agentic planning with tool use, or multilingual coverage. It wins 10 of 11 scored benchmarks in our testing and costs $0.10/MTok less on output than Llama 4 Maverick — making it better value for output-heavy workloads.

Choose Llama 4 Maverick if safety calibration is your primary constraint and you want the comparatively better-scoring model on that dimension (rank 12 vs rank 32 of 55). It also holds a $0.05/MTok input cost advantage that adds up in high-volume, input-heavy batch processing scenarios — at 100M input tokens/month that's $5,000 saved. If your pipeline does pure document ingestion or classification with minimal output and safety behavior is critical, Maverick's tradeoff is defensible. For nearly every other task, the benchmark data favors Grok 4.1 Fast.