HyperCLOVA X vs KT Mi:dm vs LG EXAONE vs Solar LLM
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
HyperCLOVA X
Naver's Korea-first sovereign large language model
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KT Mi:dm
KT's sovereign Korean-first LLM — MIT-licensed, enterprise-ready
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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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Solar LLM
Upstage's Solar LLMs — Korea's frontier family, now Solar Pro 3
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| RECATOOLS Score | 7.8 / 10 | 7.2 / 10 | 7.8 / 10 | 7 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Paid | Freemium | Freemium | Open Source |
| Free tier | Open SEED model weights on Hugging Face | Mi:dm 2.0 Base (11.5B) and Mini (2.3B) free on Hugging Face (MIT) | Weights free for research, academic, and educational use via Hugging Face (NC licence) | Free to download |
| Paid from | Enterprise via Naver Cloud / CLOVA Studio (custom) | Enterprise Mi:dm Studio API — quote-based, contact KT (pricing not publicly disclosed) | Commercial API via FriendliAI Serverless Endpoints (pay-per-token; contact FriendliAI for pricing) | — |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | Embedded across Naver's search and shopping services in Korea | Enterprise clients undisclosed; KT Cloud serves ~650,000 companies | B2B-focused; deployed internally across LG product lines; research community access via Hugging Face | 200k+ downloads |
| Founded | — | 1981 | 2020 | 2020 |
| Maker | Naver (Naver Cloud) | KT Corporation | LG Group (LG AI Research) | Upstage AI |
| Verdict | HyperCLOVA X is Korea's answer to the frontier labs — an LLM tuned for Korean language and culture rather than translated into it, with a Korean-optimized tokenizer that runs faster and cheaper on Korean text. THINK, DAS... |
Mi:dm is KT's bet that a telecom-scale Korean LLM beats importing one. The MIT-licensed Mi:dm 2.0 Base (11.5B) was the first Korean commercial-grade open model over 10B parameters, and it holds its own against EXAONE-3.5... |
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... |
Solar is the rare 2023 open-weights story that grew into a real product line. The Apache-2.0 Solar 10.7B and its depth up-scaling trick topped the Hugging Face leaderboard in December 2023; the commercial line then kept... |
| 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.