ChatGPT vs DeepSeek vs Qwen vs Sarvam AI
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
ChatGPT
The most widely used AI assistant — now on GPT-5.6, from OpenAI
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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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Sarvam AI
India's sovereign LLM, built for 22 Indian languages
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| RECATOOLS Score | 9.2 / 10 | 8.2 / 10 | 8.6 / 10 | 7.6 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Freemium | Open Source | Open Source | Open Source |
| Free tier | GPT-5-class model with daily message limits | Free access at chat.deepseek.com; open weights self-hostable | Open-weight Qwen3 models free to download and self-host | Open Apache-2.0 model weights (Sarvam-30B / 105B) |
| Paid from | $20/month (Plus); free, Go, Pro, and Team/Enterprise tiers also offered | V4-Flash $0.14/$0.28; V4-Pro $0.435/$0.87 per 1M tokens (now permanent, not promo) | Qwen3 Max preview API priced per-token on Alibaba Cloud | API / enterprise (see Sarvam) |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | ~900M weekly active users (1B+ monthly active app users as of mid-2026) | ~130M monthly active users (late 2025) | Consumer app ~203M MAU (April 2026), #3 globally | India's government-chosen sovereign LLM |
| Founded | — | 2023 | — | 2023 |
| Maker | OpenAI | High-Flyer | Alibaba Group | Sarvam AI |
| Verdict | ChatGPT is still the default AI assistant, and the July 2026 release of GPT-5.6 (Sol, Terra and Luna tiers) keeps the flagship current across writing, coding and agentic work. No rival matches its feature breadth — voice... |
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,... |
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... |
| 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.