iTANONG vs SEA-LION vs MaLLaM vs Sahabat-AI
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
iTANONG
Filipino natural-language interface to databases from DOST-ASTI, suppo...
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SEA-LION
Open-source LLM family for 11+ Southeast Asian languages
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MaLLaM
Malaysia's open-weight Malay large language model, pre-trained from sc...
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| RECATOOLS Score | 5.5 / 10 | 8.2 / 10 | 6.5 / 10 | 6.6 / 10 |
| Capability | — | — | ||
| Value for money | — | — | ||
| Ease of use | — | — | ||
| ASEAN readiness | — | — | ||
| API quality | — | — | ||
| Pricing | Contact | Open Source | Open Source | Open Source |
| Free tier | — | All weights free on Hugging Face; free API via playground.sea-lion.ai (10 req/min) | Open model weights free to download from Hugging Face. | Free and open source — self-host at no cost |
| Paid from | Government research project, access limited | 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 | DOST-ASTI | AI Singapore (AISG) — national programme hosted by the National University of Singapore, funded by Singapore NRF | Mesolitica | — |
| Verdict | What this is for: A Filipino-language natural-language interface for querying databases and documents without technical skills. Who this is for: Philippine government agencies, researchers and Filipino organizations exp... |
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... |
What this is for: A sovereign Malay-language LLM that captures local slang, dialects and cultural context for AI assistants and text applications. Who this is for: Malaysian developers, enterprises and public agencies n... |
Sahabat-AI is Indonesia's flagship sovereign-AI project, built by GoTo and Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison with AI Singapore and four Indonesian universities. The pitch: keep the data, GPUs and weights inside the country, and... |
| 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.