AI Models · Open-Source vs Paid

Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) Open vs Claude Fable 5 Paid

Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) vs Claude Fable 5 compared — price per token, context window, multimodality, openness and which to choose. Can the open-source model replace the paid one? Full 2026 breakdown.

Prices & specs refreshed from live data · OpenSourceAI.tech

Open-model prices = cheapest provider via OpenRouter; official maker rates may be higher.

Choose Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) if you want to self-host, keep your data private and skip per-token fees — it's open-weight and runs on your own hardware. Choose Claude Fable 5 if you want frontier capability through a managed API with zero infrastructure to run.

Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) vs Claude Fable 5 specs

SpecNemotron 3 Ultra (free)Claude Fable 5
MakerNVIDIAAnthropic
TypeOpen-weightProprietary
Context window1M tokens1M tokens
Input priceFree/M · free self-host$10/M
Output priceFree/M · free self-host$50/M
Vision / multimodalNoYes
Tool / function callingYesYes
Self-hostableYesNo (API only)
LicenseNVIDIA Open ModelProprietary

Feature comparison

CapabilityNemotron 3 Ultra (free)Claude Fable 5
Open weights (downloadable)
Self-hostable
Runs fully offline
Vision / multimodal
Tool / function calling
1M+ context window

Benchmarks: Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) vs Claude Fable 5

Independent benchmark scores measured by Artificial Analysis. Higher is better (except latency).

Nemotron 3 Ultra (free)
Claude Fable 5
Intelligence index
59.9
Coding index
76.5
GPQA
92.6%
Humanity's Last Exam
53.3%
Long Context Reasoning
70%
SciCode
60.2%
IFBench
63.5%
τ²-Bench
98.5%
τ-Bench Banking
26.8%
Terminal-Bench
84.6%
Terminal-Bench Hard
62.9%
Speed
70.3 tok/s
Latency
60.4s
Intelligence per $
3

Benchmark data by Artificial Analysis.

How Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) and Claude Fable 5 score

🏆 Best value & openness: Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) (4.7 vs 2.9 / 5)
CriterionNemotron 3 Ultra (free)Claude Fable 5
Cost-efficiency5.02.0
Context window5.05.0
Openness5.01.5
Self-hosting5.01.0
Multimodality3.55.0

Scores come from live data — output price (cost), context length, open vs closed weights (openness & self-hosting) and vision/tool support (multimodality). Raw task quality isn't scored here; it depends on your benchmark — see the verdict.

What each model is

Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) Open

NVIDIA · Open-weight

NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra is an open frontier-reasoning and orchestration model from NVIDIA, with 55B active parameters out of 550B total (MoE). Built on a hybrid Transformer-Mamba mixture-of-experts architecture, it...

Claude Fable 5 Paid

Anthropic · Proprietary

Claude Fable 5 is a Mythos-class model from Anthropic, built for autonomous knowledge work and coding. It supports text, image, and file inputs with text output, with reasoning support and...

Other models in these families

These variants are tracked but not compared here — one page per family keeps the comparison readable.

Other variants tracked
Nemotron 3 Super (free)Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (free)Nemotron 3 UltraNemotron 3 SuperNemotron 3 Nano Omni (free)Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3BNemotron Nano 9B V2 (free)Nemotron Nano 12B 2 VL (free)Nemotron 3.5 Content Safety (free)

Frequently asked questions

Is Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) as good as Claude Fable 5?

Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) is open-weight and competitive on many tasks, but Claude Fable 5 may still lead on the hardest reasoning and agentic work. The gap keeps narrowing — benchmark both on your actual use case before deciding.

Can I run Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) locally?

Yes. Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) has open weights, so you can self-host it on your own GPUs or run it via a low-cost API. Claude Fable 5 is API-only and cannot be self-hosted.

Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) vs Claude Fable 5 — which should I pick in 2026?

Choose Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) if you want to self-host, keep your data private and skip per-token fees — it's open-weight and runs on your own hardware. Choose Claude Fable 5 if you want frontier capability through a managed API with zero infrastructure to run.

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