AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Pencil Puzzle Bench – LLM Benchmark for Multi-Step Verifiable Reasoning
I've been working on applying LLMs to long-context, verifiable problems over the past year, and today I'm releasing a benchmark of 62,000 pencil puzzles across 94 types (sudoku, nonori, slitherlink, etc.). The benchmark also allows for intermediate checks /rule breaks for all varieties at any step. I tested 51 models against a subset (300 puzzles) in two modes: single-shot (output the full solution) and agentic (iterate with verifier feedback). Some results: - Best model (GPT 5.2@xhigh) solves 56%. (~ half the puzzles are unsolved by any model) - Agentic solves average 29 turns. The…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
LLM Stats▲293I was overspending on GPT-4o. It was really hard to compare different models I could switch to, so I built this LLM comparison tool. It shows leaderboards, pricing, and performance data across 100+ LLMs (including all major providers and open-source models). Key features: - Live pricing comparisons - Benchmark Scores (MMLU, HumanEval, GPQA, etc.) - Context length vs cost analysis - Speed/throughput tests across providers - Quality vs price visualizations - Open source (all data verifiable) Try it out: https://llmstats.com I'd like to know your opinion :) Tech stack: Next.js,…
Oct 2025 · llm-stats.com · its alternatives →
- 2

Hey Folks! I've been building an open source benchmark for measuring local LLM performance on your own hardware. The benchmarking tool is a CLI written on top of Llamafile to allow for portability across different hardware setups and operating systems. The website is a database of results from the benchmark, allowing you to explore the performance of different models and hardware configurations. Please give it a try! Any feedback and contribution is much appreciated. I'd love for this to serve as a helpful resource for the local AI community. For more check out: - Website:…
2025 · localscore.ai · its alternatives →
- 3AT
I recently built a small open-source tool to benchmark different LLM API endpoints — including OpenAI, Claude, and self-hosted models (like llama.cpp). It runs a configurable number of test requests and reports two key metrics: • First-token latency (ms): How long it takes for the first token to appear • Output speed (tokens/sec): Overall output fluency Demo: https://llmapitest.com/ Code: https://github.com/qjr87/llm-api-test The goal is to provide a simple, visual, and reproducible way to evaluate performance across different LLM providers, including…
2025 · llmapitest.com · its alternatives →
- 4

This is a weekend hack that I'd like to further develop as it's working surprisingly well. Using MCTS, we can explore a space of possible verified programs with an LLM. We check the partial programs at each step, and so steer towards programs that pass the verifier. https://github.com/namin/llm-verified-with-monte-carlo-tree-...
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5UD
Hey HN! I’m the founder of Unify, and we’ve just released our Model Hub, which provides a collection of LLM endpoints with live runtime benchmarks all plotted across time: https://unify.ai/hub A key finding is that static tabular runtime benchmarks for LLMs simply do not work. It’s necessary to take a time-series perspective, and plot the variations through time. We currently have 21 models provided by: Anyscale, Perplexity AI, Replicate, Together AI, OctoAI, Mistral AI and OpenAI, with more on the roadmap. We test across different regions (Asia, US, Europe), with varied…
2024 · its alternatives →
- 6

PokerBench is my attempt at a new LLM benchmark wherein frontier models play Texas Hold'em in an arena setting. It also features a simulator to view individual games and observe how the different models reason about poker strategy. Opus/Haiku, Gemini Pro/Flash, GPT-5.2/5 mini, and Grok 4.1 Fast Reasoning have all been included. All code -> https://github.com/JoeAzar/pokerbench
Jan 2026 · pokerbench.adfontes.io · its alternatives →
- 7

I have been working in AI space for a while now, first at FAANG with ML since 2021, then with LLM in start-ups since early 2023. I think LLM Application development is extremely iterative, more so than any other types of development. This is because to improve an LLM application performance (accuracy, hallucinations, latency, cost), you need to try various combinations of LLM models, prompt templates (e.g., few-shot, chain-of-thought), prompt context with different RAG architecture, different agent architecture, and more. There are thousands of possible combinations and you need a process…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8

Hi HN community, I have been working on benchmarking publicly available LLMs these past couple of weeks. More precisely, I am interested on the finetuning piece since a lot of businesses are starting to entertain the idea of self-hosting LLMs trained on their proprietary data rather than relying on third party APIs. To this point, I am tracking the following 4 pillars of evaluation that businesses are typically look into: - Performance - Time to train an LLM - Cost to train an LLM - Inference (throughput / latency / cost per token) For each LLM, my aim is to benchmark them for…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9

I built a small benchmark to test CLI coding agents on blind bug detection. A challenger agent injects bugs and writes ground truth (`bugs.json`). A different reviewer agent audits the repo without seeing ground truth, and an LLM matcher scores bug-to-finding assignments. Current run: 50 repos, 150 challenges, 450 reviews, 2,603 injected bugs. Weighted detection: Claude 58.05%, Codex 37.84%, Gemini 27.81%. LLM-judge benchmarks are easy to get wrong, so I’d really appreciate critical feedback on benchmark fairness, scoring/matching methodology, and obvious failure modes I’m missing. Full…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10

Continuous evaluation of LLM reasoning on competitive code
Dec 2025 · its alternatives →
- 11

Adversarial multi-turn benchmark for LLM debate quality, using side-swapped matchups and multi-model judging to rank models by judged debate performance. - lechmazur/debate
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12

We were genuinely impressed by Yann LeCun’s recent announcement about his Sudoku solver based on Energy-Based Models here: https://logicalintelligence.com/yann-lecun So we (a software engineer and prodigy mathematician) worked in the weekend to see if we can beat it and we did! If Kona solves puzzles in 313 milliseconds, we currently solve 270,000 puzzles per second! We do not know the internal mechanics behind Logical Intelligence’s system, but we are happy to share ours in the webpage there is a full description, code and also a paper published. Why people are obsessed with…
Feb 2026 · davisgeometric.com · its alternatives →
- 13

Performance comparison of ClickHouse vs PostgreSQL using LLM-style query patterns on realistic aircraft tracking data - GitHub - 514-labs/LLM-query-test: Performance comparison of ClickHouse vs PostgreSQL using LLM-style query patterns on realistic aircraft tracking data
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14

A repository that contains models, datasets, and fine-tuning techniques for DB-GPT, with the purpose of enhancing model performance in Text-to-SQL - eosphoros-ai/DB-GPT-Hub
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15

Test and compare results from Large Language Models (LLMs) simultaneously, including Anthropic's Claude 1.2, OpenAI's GPT-4, GPT-3.5 turbo, and Cohere's CommandXL Nightly. Analyze the results side-by-side in a single UI on top of LLM APIs.
2023 · retool.com · its alternatives →
- 16ΤB
τ-Bench is an open benchmark for evaluating AI agents on grounded, multi-turn customer service tasks with verifiable outcomes. It's been great to see the community adopt it since launch — this is now the third iteration. With τ³-Bench, we're extending it to two new settings: knowledge-intensive retrieval and full-duplex voice. τ-Knowledge: agents must navigate ~700 interconnected policy documents to complete multi-step tasks. Best frontier model (GPT-5.2, high reasoning) hits ~25%. The surprising part: even when you hand the model the exact documents it needs, performance only reaches ~40%.…
Mar 2026 · its alternatives →
- 17

I've seen a lot of comments about how complex frameworks like LangChain can be. Over the holidays, I wanted to see how minimal an LLM framework could get if we stripped away everything non-essential. The result is an LLM framework in just 100 lines of code. These 100 lines capture what I see as the core abstraction of most LLM frameworks: a nested directed graph that breaks down tasks into multiple LLM steps, with branching and recursion to enable agent-like decision-making. From there, you can layer on more advanced features like agents, RAG, task decomposition, and more. I’ve intentionally…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18

What PokerBattle.ai is a week-long live no-limit Texas Hold’em tournament where all players are top-tier reasoning LLMs. We’re testing how different models handle imperfect information and whether they can sustain consistent, math-driven poker without tool use or custom code. Why - In poker you can do well with basic math + consistent logic. - Superhuman poker AIs exist, but they rely on massive simulation/game-theory solvers and are effectively black boxes. - We want a rough, apples-to-apples comparison of LLM reasoning on poker decisions, and to collect public reasoning summaries that…
2025 · pokerbattle.ai · its alternatives →
- 19

Measures the ability of various LLMs to navigate a fictional codebase via iterative directory tree expansion and observation. Each model's baseline ability is compared against combinations of various prompt engineering mods to quantify exactly how much they help or hinder the LLM. Interesting findings here: https://github.com/aiwebb/treenav-bench#interesting-findings
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20

Reproducible benchmarks for evaluating AI models
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21

Benchmark evaluating LLMs on their ability to create and resist disinformation. Includes comprehensive testing across major models (Claude, GPT-4, Gemini, Llama, etc.) with standardized evaluation metrics. - lechmazur/deception
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22

If you're interested in exploring what LLM-based agent systems these days actually do to solve certain benchmarks such as SWEBench or WebArena, we created a small leaderboard with our team, that allows to view a lot of public and OSS agent results including all the runtime traces (the step-by-step reasoning behind the scenes). Looking at traces is actually quite interesting, as they reveal a lot about the inner working and shortcomings of current agent system, e.g. see https://explorer.invariantlabs.ai/u/invariant/webarena--SteP... for an example trace.
2024 · explorer.invariantlabs.ai · its alternatives →
- 23

Hi HN, I'd like to share a logic number puzzle game I created! It is somewhat reminiscent of Sudoku and Minesweeper, but with its own twist. The rules are simple but it can be quite challenging! Please enjoy :) The feedback on the game prototype was invaluable and I incorporated a lot into what I hope is a more polished version of the game. What's new: Introduced a daily puzzle challenge. Dark mode. Enhanced user experience with improved UI. I'd love to hear your thoughts on these updates. Feedback is always appreciated!
2023 · cubisum.com · its alternatives →
- 24BA
I built CodeLens.AI - a tool that compares how 6 top LLMs (GPT-5, Claude Opus 4.1, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Grok 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro, o3) handle your actual code tasks. How it works: - Upload code + describe task (refactoring, security review, architecture, etc.) - All 6 models run in parallel (~2-5 min) - See side-by-side comparison with AI judge scores - Community votes on winners (blind voting) - Each evaluation gets reflected in the overall AI model leaderboard, showing us best ones Why I built this: Existing benchmarks (HumanEval, SWE-Bench) don't reflect real-world developer tasks. I wanted to…
2025 · codelens.ai · its alternatives →
Also compare
- LLM Stats alternatives
- LocalScore – Local LLM Benchmark alternatives
- A tool to benchmark LLM APIs (OpenAI, Claude, local/self-hosted) alternatives
- LLM Verified with Monte Carlo Tree Search alternatives
- Unify – Dynamic LLM Benchmarks and SSO for Multi-Vendor Deployment alternatives
- Watch LLMs play 21,000 hands of Poker alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →