The closest alternative to Llama 4 Scout is Nova Pro 1.0 — comparable intelligence (13.5 vs 13.5); for a cheaper option, Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) runs Free/M vs $0.100/M; for more speed, gpt-oss-120b (free) hits 554 t/s; and the best open-weight substitute is MiniMax M3.
Nova Pro 1.0 is the closest alternative to Llama 4 Scout, with an Intelligence Index of 13.5 (Llama 4 Scout scores 13.5) at $0.800 per million input tokens.
Yes — Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) costs Free per million input tokens versus $0.100 for Llama 4 Scout, while staying within ~8 points of its Intelligence Index.
MiniMax M3 is the strongest open-weight alternative to Llama 4 Scout — downloadable from Hugging Face and self-hostable, scoring 54.7 on intelligence.