BharatGen vs Sarvam AI vs Krutrim 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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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 | 7.6 / 10 | 5.8 / 10 | 8.2 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Open Source | Open Source | Freemium | Open Source |
| Free tier | — | Open Apache-2.0 model weights (Sarvam-30B / 105B) | Chat interface free at chat.olakrutrim.com; cloud free access ran until Diwali 2025 | All weights free on Hugging Face; free API via playground.sea-lion.ai (10 req/min) |
| Paid from | — | API / enterprise (see Sarvam) | On-demand NVIDIA A100/H100 GPUs (A100 listed from ~Rs 105/hr; confirm on Krutrim Cloud) | 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 | 25+ enterprise customers; consumer app reached ~100K downloads before withdrawal (Apr 2026) | Hundreds to low-thousands of monthly Hugging Face downloads per variant |
| Founded | 2024 | 2023 | 2023 | — |
| Maker | BharatGen Technology Foundation (IIT Bombay / DST / IndiaAI Mission) | Sarvam AI | Krutrim SI Designs Pvt. Ltd. (Ola Group) | 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... |
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... |
Krutrim made genuine history as India's first AI unicorn and its Krutrim-2 model delivers real multilingual capability across 22 Indian languages — benchmarking competitively against much larger open-source models on Ind... |
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.