Ant Ling (Bailing) vs DeepSeek vs Qwen vs Z.ai (Zhipu GLM)
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Ant Ling (Bailing)
Ant Group's open-weight Ling and Ring model family, including trillion...
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DeepSeek
China's frontier open-weight LLM lab — now shipping the V4 family at a...
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Qwen
Alibaba's LLM family: open Qwen3 weights plus closed Qwen3.7-Max
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Z.ai (Zhipu GLM)
Open-weights frontier LLM family from Zhipu AI
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| RECATOOLS Score | 7.2 / 10 | 8.2 / 10 | 8.6 / 10 | 7.6 / 10 |
| Capability | — | |||
| Value for money | — | |||
| Ease of use | — | |||
| ASEAN readiness | — | |||
| API quality | — | |||
| Pricing | Open Source | Open Source | Open Source | Freemium |
| Free tier | Open weights, free to download and self-host on Hugging Face and ModelScope | Free access at chat.deepseek.com; open weights self-hostable | Open-weight Qwen3 models free to download and self-host | GLM-4.7-Flash and GLM-4.5-Flash are free for all registered users |
| Paid from | — | API from $0.15/M input tokens off-peak (V4.1-Flash, cache miss); $0.30 at peak | Qwen3 Max preview API priced per-token on Alibaba Cloud | $18/month (Coding Lite) — 20% off quarterly, 30% yearly; API from $0.07/M tokens |
| Has API | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | — | ~130M monthly active users (late 2025) | Consumer app ~203M MAU (April 2026), #3 globally | — |
| Founded | — | 2023 | — | 2019 |
| Maker | Ant Group | High-Flyer | Alibaba Group | — |
| Verdict | What this is for: An open-weight model family covering fast-response Ling models (up to a trillion parameters) and Ring reasoning models, built on efficient mixture-of-experts architectures. Who this is for: Developers... |
DeepSeek is the Chinese lab whose open-weight models repeatedly shock the market by matching far costlier frontier systems at a fraction of the price. The 2026 V4 family (V4-Pro and the cheaper V4-Flash, both 1M-context)... |
Qwen is Alibaba's flagship LLM family and a cornerstone of the open-weight ecosystem — the Qwen3 line ships freely on Hugging Face from small dense models up to large MoE sizes. Capability is frontier-adjacent on coding,... |
The GLM series is still the strongest value play among frontier-adjacent APIs, and 2026 made Zhipu impossible to ignore: a January Hong Kong IPO (the first listed LLM company), GLM-5 in February, and GLM-5.2 in June with... |
| 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.