Alpaca vs Llama vs OpenChat vs Vicuna
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Alpaca
Stanford's instruction-tuned Llama model — trained on 52k GPT-generate...
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Llama
Meta's open-weight LLM family — Llama 4 landed, Behemoth didn't
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OpenChat
C-RLFT-tuned open 7B that once matched ChatGPT on benchmarks
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Vicuna
Fine-tuned open-source chatbot trained on ShareGPT conversations — 90%...
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| RECATOOLS Score | 3.8 / 10 | 8.3 / 10 | 6.3 / 10 | 3.2 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Open Source | Open Source | Open Source | Open Source |
| Free tier | Fully free | Free model weights for download and local use | Fully free | Fully free |
| Paid from | — | — | — | — |
| Has API | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | 500k+ downloads | 10m+ downloads | 200k+ downloads | 1m+ downloads |
| Founded | 2023 | 2023 | 2023 | 2023 |
| Maker | Stanford University | Meta Platforms | Tsinghua University | LMSYS Org |
| Verdict | Stanford Alpaca is a landmark 2023 research project that fine-tuned Meta's LLaMA 7B on instruction-following data generated cheaply via GPT, demonstrating that small, affordable fine-tunes could approach the behavior of... |
Llama is still the backbone of the open-weight LLM ecosystem — Llama 2 and 3 built it, and Llama 4 (Scout and Maverick, shipped April 2025) kept it going, with a huge footprint on Hugging Face, Ollama, Together AI and Fi... |
OpenChat earned its reputation honestly: the 7B OpenChat 3.5 traded blows with early-2023 ChatGPT on public benchmarks thanks to C-RLFT, a training method that squeezes signal out of mixed-quality data, all under Apache... |
Vicuna is a historically important open-source chat model released in 2023 by LMSYS, fine-tuned from Meta's LLaMA on user-shared ChatGPT conversations and notable for showing how cheaply a strong open chatbot could be ap... |
| 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.