Streaming TTFT vs total latency, April 2026

Which AI provider has the fastest time-to-first-token? In April 2026 on streaming-and-successful Requesty requests, Azure led TTFT at 593 ms with a 960 ms p50 total, the streaming-UX winner on both axes. xAI was among the fastest on total latency (5.68 s) but slowest to first token (3.27 s), which suggests buffered upstream behaviour rather than true streaming. Vertex (Gemini) and Vertex (Claude) sit at very different points: Gemini totals 3.05 s, Claude totals 8.03 s on the same Vertex route.

Why it mattersTime-to-first-token is what users actually feel as latency in chat UIs. A 600 ms TTFT feels instantaneous; a 3 s TTFT feels broken even if total latency is the same. Buffered streaming masquerading as real streaming is a common antipattern in this dataset, and any latency benchmark that only quotes total p50 will miss it entirely.

Requesty (2026). Streaming TTFT vs total latency, April 2026. Requesty Data. https://requesty.ai/data/streaming-ttft-vs-total-april-2026

@misc{requesty_streaming_ttft_vs_total_april_2026,
  author       = {{Requesty}},
  title        = {Streaming TTFT vs total latency, April 2026},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://requesty.ai/data/streaming-ttft-vs-total-april-2026}},
  note         = {Requesty Data}
}