Agnes AI vs Grab AI Assistant vs MERaLiON vs SEA-LION
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Agnes AI
SEA-built AI workspace with its own 8B open-source SeaLLM model
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Grab AI Assistant
AI features across Grab's Southeast Asian superapp, powered by its Gra...
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MERaLiON
Singapore's national multimodal speech-text LLM built for Southeast As...
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SEA-LION
Open-source LLM family for 11+ Southeast Asian languages
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| RECATOOLS Score | 7.1 / 10 | 6.5 / 10 | 7 / 10 | 8.2 / 10 |
| Capability | — | — | ||
| Value for money | — | — | ||
| Ease of use | — | — | ||
| ASEAN readiness | — | — | ||
| API quality | — | — | ||
| Pricing | Freemium | Free | Open Source | Open Source |
| Free tier | Advertised as a free omni-modal AI API; the vendor publishes no pricing page | Included within the Grab app for users, drivers and merchants in supported markets. | Open model weights free to download and run from Hugging Face. | All weights free on Hugging Face; free API via playground.sea-lion.ai (10 req/min) |
| Paid from | — | — | — | Open weights, free to self-host; hosted access via cloud providers |
| Has API | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | — | — | — | Hundreds to low-thousands of monthly Hugging Face downloads per variant |
| Founded | — | — | — | — |
| Maker | SAPIENS | Grab Holdings | A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) | AI Singapore (AISG) — national programme hosted by the National University of Singapore, funded by Singapore NRF |
| Verdict | Agnes AI is the most credible homegrown case for a Southeast Asian model company right now: instead of just reselling access to OpenAI or Anthropic, Sapiens AI shipped Agnes-SeaLLM-8B, an open-weights 8B model on Hugging... |
What this is for: In-app AI assistants and automation for Grab consumers, drivers and merchants across mobility, food and merchant operations. Who this is for: Grab users, driver-partners and merchant-partners in Southe... |
What this is for: A regionally-tuned speech-text LLM that understands Southeast Asian languages, accents, Singlish and code-switching, with audio and emotion understanding. Who this is for: Researchers, developers and S... |
SEA-LION is the most credible open-weight LLM built specifically for Southeast Asia -- nothing else in the open-source space covers this many regional languages this well. Backed by Singapore's National Research Foundati... |
| Full review → | Full review → | Full review → | Full review → |
Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.