ILMU (ILMUchat) vs SEA-LION

A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.

ILMU (ILMUchat) Malaysia's sovereign LLM, tuned on rojak speech, launched by the PM Visit SEA-LION Open-source LLM family for 11+ Southeast Asian languages Visit
RECATOOLS Score 6.8 / 10 8.2 / 10
Capability 5.5 8.5
Value for money 7 9.5
Ease of use 7 7
ASEAN readiness 8.5 9.8
API quality 0 7.5
Pricing Freemium Open Source
Free tier Free public platform access All weights free on Hugging Face; free API via playground.sea-lion.ai (10 req/min)
Paid from Business platform access — contact YTL AI Labs Open weights, free to self-host; hosted access via cloud providers
Has API
Open source
Free to use
Users Hundreds to low-thousands of monthly Hugging Face downloads per variant
Founded
Maker AI Singapore (AISG) — national programme hosted by the National University of Singapore, funded by Singapore NRF
Verdict

ILMU's core claim — that it handles rojak, the Malay/English/Chinese/dialect code-switching Malaysians actually speak — checks out in early hands-on testing, including a review that had it give a neutral, well-sourced ac...

SEA-LION is the most credible open-weight LLM built specifically for Southeast Asia -- nothing else in the open-source space covers this many regional languages this well. Backed by Singapore's National Research Foundati...

Full review → Full review →
← Back to AI Directory

Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.