DeepSeek vs LG EXAONE vs Qwen
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
DeepSeek
China's frontier open-weight LLM lab — now shipping the V4 family at a...
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LG EXAONE
Korea's open vision-language AI — EXAONE 4.5 beats GPT-5-mini on STEM
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Qwen
Alibaba's LLM family: open Qwen3 weights plus closed Qwen3.7-Max
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| RECATOOLS Score | 8.2 / 10 | 7.8 / 10 | 8.6 / 10 |
| Capability | |||
| Value for money | |||
| Ease of use | |||
| ASEAN readiness | |||
| API quality | |||
| Pricing | Open Source | Freemium | Open Source |
| Free tier | Free access at chat.deepseek.com; open weights self-hostable | Weights free for research, academic, and educational use via Hugging Face (NC licence) | Open-weight Qwen3 models free to download and self-host |
| Paid from | V4-Flash $0.14/$0.28; V4-Pro $0.435/$0.87 per 1M tokens (now permanent, not promo) | Commercial API via FriendliAI Serverless Endpoints (pay-per-token; contact FriendliAI for pricing) | Qwen3 Max preview API priced per-token on Alibaba Cloud |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | ~130M monthly active users (late 2025) | B2B-focused; deployed internally across LG product lines; research community access via Hugging Face | Consumer app ~203M MAU (April 2026), #3 globally |
| Founded | 2023 | 2020 | — |
| Maker | High-Flyer | LG Group (LG AI Research) | Alibaba Group |
| Verdict | 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)... |
EXAONE 4.5, out in April 2026, moves LG AI Research's hybrid reasoning line into vision: a 33B model (32B language backbone plus a 1.2B vision encoder) that reads images alongside text and averages 77.3 across five STEM... |
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,... |
| 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.