Doubao 豆包 (ByteDance) vs Kimi 月之暗面 vs StepFun 阶跃星辰 vs StepFun Yuewen 阶跃星辰 跃问
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Doubao 豆包 (ByteDance)
ByteDance's flagship consumer AI assistant
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Kimi 月之暗面
Long-context chat assistant from Moonshot AI
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StepFun 阶跃星辰
Chinese multimodal frontier-model lab founded by Microsoft Research ve...
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StepFun Yuewen 阶跃星辰 跃问
StepFun's multimodal chat app, backed by a $717M round and IPO plans
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| RECATOOLS Score | 6.4 / 10 | 7.3 / 10 | 6.6 / 10 | 6.6 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Free | Freemium | Freemium | Freemium |
| Free tier | — | — | — | — |
| Paid from | Free consumer tier; Doubao 1.5 Pro API ≈ $0.11 per million input tokens and ≈ $0.28 per million | API from $0.95/$4.00 per M tokens (input/output; OpenRouter ~$0.75/$3.50); free web tier | — | — |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | Surpassed 100 million daily active users by late 2025 | 36M+ MAU (as of late 2024) | — | — |
| Founded | 2023 | 2023 | 2023 | — |
| Maker | — | — | — | — |
| Verdict | Doubao is ByteDance's flagship consumer AI assistant and one of the most-used chatbots in China, with 150M+ weekly active users. Its underlying Doubao/Seed model family is genuinely strong on Chinese-language tasks and a... |
Kimi is Moonshot AI's consumer front-end for the open-weight K-series models, and in 2026 it's no longer a China-only story: kimi.com, the Kimi Code CLI and an English API platform give it a real international footprint,... |
StepFun (阶跃星辰) is a well-funded Chinese AI lab building capable multimodal Step models, with an OpenAI-compatible API, realtime voice tooling and recent open-source releases such as Step 3.7 Flash aimed at agentic us... |
StepFun built its name on multimodal strength rather than pure chat — Step3-VL-10B reportedly matches open models 10-20x its size, and Step-Video-T2V, Step-Audio 2 and Step1X-Edit are all credible, Apache-2.0-licensed re... |
| 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.