Wenxin Assistant 文心助手 (formerly Ernie Bot) vs Doubao Image 豆包图像 (Seedream) vs Tencent Hy Image (HunyuanImage 混元生图) vs Qwen-Image
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Wenxin Assistant 文心助手 (formerly Ernie Bot)
Baidu's free ERNIE-powered assistant, which absorbed the Ernie Bot sit...
Visit
|
Doubao Image 豆包图像 (Seedream)
ByteDance's Seedream image generation inside the Doubao app
Visit
|
Tencent Hy Image (HunyuanImage 混元生图)
Tencent's 80B open-weight image model, plus an API-only Hy Image 3.5 p...
Visit
|
Qwen-Image
Alibaba's open-source 20B MMDiT image foundation model under Apache 2....
Visit
|
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RECATOOLS Score | 6.8 / 10 | 6.3 / 10 | 6.4 / 10 | 8 / 10 |
| Capability | — | |||
| Value for money | — | |||
| Ease of use | — | |||
| ASEAN readiness | — | |||
| API quality | — | |||
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium | Freemium | Open Source |
| Free tier | Wenxin Assistant is free for individuals; Baidu says all of its features are free, with no paid tier | Image creation and editing free in the Doubao app (region-gated outside mainland China); paid Pro plans add quota | HunyuanImage 3.0 weights free to self-host under Tencent's community licence (excludes EU, UK and South Korea); consumer use in Tencent's Yuanbao app | Older line Apache 2.0 — the newest Qwen-Image-2.1 is research-only under the Qwen Research Licence |
| Paid from | ¥4 per million input tokens (ERNIE 5.1 on Qianfan, prompts up to 32K) | Seedream API from $0.018/image (BytePlus); Doubao Pro from ¥68/month | $0.024/image (Hy Image 3.5 preview API, up to 2K, Tencent Cloud International) | Usage-based via Alibaba Cloud (DashScope) and third-party hosted APIs. |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | ~200 million monthly active users (2026) | — | — | — |
| Founded | 2023 | 2023 | 2024 | — |
| Maker | Baidu, Inc. | ByteDance | Tencent | Alibaba |
| Verdict | Wenxin Assistant gives individuals free access to Baidu's current ERNIE models with search built in, and Task Engine 2.0 makes it more of an agent than a chatbot. ERNIE 5.0 and 5.1 have ranked first among Chinese models... |
Doubao's image creation runs on ByteDance's Seedream models and is especially good at Chinese prompts and Chinese text inside images. Basic use is free in the app, and the API is cheap: BytePlus lists Seedream 5.0 Flash... |
HunyuanImage 3.0 is one of the most capable image models you can download, with strong Chinese-language prompt handling and editing variants, and the per-image API for Hy Image 3.5 preview is inexpensive.It is not open s... |
What this is for: Open-source text-to-image generation and editing with standout multilingual text rendering, strong for posters and Chinese/English typography. Who this is for: Developers, researchers, and studios want... |
| 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.