Verdict
Built from the measurements below
- Muse Spark Open is more accurate: 77.5% against 59.0% on the same 78 questions, a 18.5-point gap that is statistically significant.
- Llama 4 Maverick is 7.7× cheaper per question as billed ($0.00059 vs $0.0045), reasoning tokens included.
- Muse Spark Open generates text 16× faster: 220 tokens per second against 13.
- Muse Spark Open starts answering sooner: 0.5 s to the first token, against 0.7 s for Llama 4 Maverick.
- Muse Spark Open accepts more context: 1M tokens against 524k.
Which should you choose?
Choose Llama 4 Maverick for the lower cost per correct answer ($0.001 against $0.0058). Choose Muse Spark Open for the most accurate answers of the two, faster streaming, a quicker first token, a 1M-token context window and more hosts to choose from on OpenRouter (6 against 3). The widest subject gap is in engineering: Muse Spark Open answered 11 of 15 correctly, Llama 4 Maverick 6 of 14. With so few questions per subject, treat this as a lead to test on your own prompts, not a result.
Accuracy gap -18.5 points (z = -2.50). We call a winner only when z is at least 1.96, the usual 95% threshold. Speed, latency and price need a 10% margin.