BharatGen vs Bhashini vs Sarvam AI vs SEA-LION
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
BharatGen
Government-funded sovereign AI models for 22 Indian languages
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BH Bhashini India's free national language-AI stack for 22+ Indian languages Visit |
Sarvam AI
India's sovereign LLM, built for 22 Indian languages
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SEA-LION
Open-source LLM family for 11+ Southeast Asian languages
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| RECATOOLS Score | 6 / 10 | 7 / 10 | 7.6 / 10 | 8.2 / 10 |
| Capability | — | |||
| Value for money | — | |||
| Ease of use | — | |||
| ASEAN readiness | — | |||
| API quality | — | |||
| Pricing | Open Source | Freemium | Open Source | Open Source |
| Free tier | — | Free tier for proof-of-concept/testing only; production or monetized use requires a paid plan | Open Apache-2.0 model weights (Sarvam-30B / 105B) | All weights free on Hugging Face; free API via playground.sea-lion.ai (10 req/min) |
| Paid from | — | From ~250 rupees/month (e.g. TTS up to 50K characters/day) | API / enterprise (see Sarvam) | Open weights, free to self-host; hosted access via cloud providers |
| Has API | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | — | — | India's government-chosen sovereign LLM | Hundreds to low-thousands of monthly Hugging Face downloads per variant |
| Founded | 2024 | — | 2023 | — |
| Maker | BharatGen Technology Foundation (IIT Bombay / DST / IndiaAI Mission) | Ministry of Electronics and IT, Government of India | Sarvam AI | AI Singapore (AISG) — national programme hosted by the National University of Singapore, funded by Singapore NRF |
| Verdict | BharatGen is less a company than a nine-institution research consortium, led by IIT Bombay and backed by roughly ₹1,235 crore from India's AI Mission and Department of Science and Technology. Its flagship, Param2, is a 1... |
Bhashini is India's state-run language-AI infrastructure, and its pitch is coverage most commercial providers won't touch — speech, translation, TTS and OCR across all 22 scheduled Indian languages plus English. Over 350... |
Sarvam is the most credible vehicle for India's sovereign-AI push: Sarvam-30B and Sarvam-105B were trained end-to-end on IndiaAI compute, cover 22 Indian languages, and ship under Apache-2.0, so builders can self-host wi... |
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.