LG EXAONE vs Qwen
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
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 | 7.8 / 10 | 8.6 / 10 |
| Capability | ||
| Value for money | ||
| Ease of use | ||
| ASEAN readiness | ||
| API quality | ||
| Pricing | Freemium | Open Source |
| Free tier | 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 | 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 | B2B-focused; deployed internally across LG product lines; research community access via Hugging Face | Consumer app ~203M MAU (April 2026), #3 globally |
| Founded | 2020 | — |
| Maker | LG Group (LG AI Research) | Alibaba Group |
| Verdict | 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 → |
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Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.