Llama vs Mistral AI vs Qwen vs SEA-LION
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Llama
Meta's open-weight LLM family — Llama 4 landed, Behemoth didn't
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Mistral AI
European frontier-model lab
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Qwen
Alibaba's LLM family: open Qwen3 weights plus closed Qwen3.7-Max
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SEA-LION
Open-source LLM family for 11+ Southeast Asian languages
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| RECATOOLS Score | 8.3 / 10 | 8.4 / 10 | 8.6 / 10 | 8.2 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Open Source | Freemium | Open Source | Open Source |
| Free tier | Free model weights for download and local use | Free open-weight models for self-hosting | Open-weight Qwen3 models free to download and self-host | All weights free on Hugging Face; free API via playground.sea-lion.ai (10 req/min) |
| Paid from | — | $0.14/1M tokens (Mistral Small via API) | Qwen3 Max preview API priced per-token on Alibaba Cloud | Open weights, free to self-host; hosted access via cloud providers |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | 10m+ downloads | 500k+ API users | Consumer app ~203M MAU (April 2026), #3 globally | Hundreds to low-thousands of monthly Hugging Face downloads per variant |
| Founded | — | 2023 | — | — |
| Maker | Meta Platforms | Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, Timothee Lacroix | Alibaba Group | AI Singapore (AISG) — national programme hosted by the National University of Singapore, funded by Singapore NRF |
| Verdict | Llama is still the backbone of the open-weight LLM ecosystem — Llama 2 and 3 built it, and Llama 4 (Scout and Maverick, shipped April 2025) kept it going, with a huge footprint on Hugging Face, Ollama, Together AI and Fi... |
Mistral is the strongest European alternative to the US labs, and its open-weight releases are the reason: Mistral Large 3 (December 2025) ships as a 675B-parameter MoE under Apache 2.0 with a 256K context window, Medium... |
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,... |
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 → | Full review → | Full review → |
Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.