DeepSeek vs Kimi 月之暗面 vs Qwen vs Z.ai (Zhipu GLM)
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
DeepSeek
Hangzhou lab shipping MIT-licensed V4 models and a very cheap API
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Kimi 月之暗面
Moonshot AI's assistant and open-weight K3 model with a 1M-token conte...
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Qwen
Alibaba Cloud's LLM family, open weights through to the Qwen3.8-Max fl...
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Z.ai (Zhipu GLM)
Zhipu's GLM model family, open weights and a Singapore-run API
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| RECATOOLS Score | 8.2 / 10 | 7.3 / 10 | 8.6 / 10 | 7.6 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Open Source | Freemium | Freemium | Freemium |
| Free tier | Free chat on the web and in the app; MIT-licensed open weights to self-host | Adagio free plan: 1 concurrent agent task, 2 scheduled tasks, 2 projects and 500MB of project storage | Open weights to self-host; free Qwen Chat; 1M free tokens per model for 90 days in Model Studio's Singapore region | GLM-4.7-Flash, GLM-4.5-Flash and GLM-4.6V-Flash free on the API; free chat at chat.z.ai |
| Paid from | $0.15 per 1M input tokens (deepseek-flash, cache miss, off-peak); $0.30 at peak | $19/month (Plus, or $15/month billed annually); API from $0.95 in and $4.00 out per M tokens | From $0.03 per million input tokens (qwen3.7-flash, prompts up to 32K, Singapore region) | $18/month (GLM Coding Plan Lite; $12.60/month billed yearly); API priced per token |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | ~130M monthly active users (late 2025) | 36M+ MAU (as of late 2024) | Consumer app ~203M MAU (April 2026), #3 globally | — |
| Founded | 2023 | 2023 | 2023 | 2022 |
| Maker | High-Flyer | Moonshot AI (月之暗面) | Alibaba Cloud | Knowledge Atlas Technology (Zhipu AI) |
| Verdict | DeepSeek remains the price benchmark for capable models: V4.1-Flash costs $0.15 to $0.30 per million input tokens and V4-Pro under $4 per million output at peak, both with 1M-token context, and the weights are MIT-licens... |
Kimi earns its place on capability and price. K3 is the largest open-weight model available, with a one-million-token context and weights you can run yourself under a licence that only bites on very large commercial user... |
Qwen is the most practical open-weight family to build on in 2026: Apache 2.0 models from under a billion to hundreds of billions of parameters, and now even the Max-tier flagship available to download. Hosted pricing in... |
GLM is one of the strongest price-performance options among open-weight model families: GLM-5.3 lists at $1.40 and $4.40 per million tokens, Flash models are free, and the GLM Coding Plan from $18 a month plugs into Clau... |
| 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.