Beluga vs Llama vs Nous Hermes vs OpenChat
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Beluga
Stability AI's 2023 Llama fine-tunes — non-commercial, abandoned
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Llama
Meta's open-weight LLM family — Llama 4 landed, Behemoth didn't
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Nous Hermes
Nous Research's open Hermes models — steerable, minimally filtered
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OpenChat
C-RLFT-tuned open 7B that once matched ChatGPT on benchmarks
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| RECATOOLS Score | 4.3 / 10 | 8.3 / 10 | 6.8 / 10 | 6.3 / 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 | 200k+ downloads | 10m+ downloads | 500k+ downloads | 200k+ downloads |
| Founded | 2023 | 2023 | 2023 | 2023 |
| Maker | Stability AI | Meta Platforms | Nous Research Community | Tsinghua University |
| Verdict | Stable Beluga is a closed chapter. The Llama-2-70B Beluga 2 briefly led the Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard in mid-2023 on the strength of Orca-style synthetic training data, but both models shipped under a non-commerc... |
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... |
The Hermes series is the closest thing open-source AI has to a house brand: Llama- and Mistral-based fine-tunes known for strong instruction-following, steerability and refusal rates far below the big labs' defaults. Her... |
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... |
| 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.