Nous Hermes vs OpenChat vs Orca vs WizardLM
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Nous Hermes
Nous Research's open Hermes models — steerable, minimally filtered
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OpenChat
C-RLFT-tuned open 7B that once matched ChatGPT on benchmarks
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Orca
Microsoft Research's reasoning-tuned small models — research-only
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WizardLM
Evol-Instruct LLM family — ex-Microsoft team, now dormant open weights
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| RECATOOLS Score | 6.8 / 10 | 6.3 / 10 | 6 / 10 | 5.4 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Open Source | Open Source | Open Source | Open Source |
| Free tier | Fully free | Fully free | Fully free | Fully free |
| Paid from | — | — | — | — |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | 500k+ downloads | 200k+ downloads | 200k+ downloads | 500k+ downloads |
| Founded | 2023 | 2023 | 2023 | 2023 |
| Maker | Nous Research Community | Tsinghua University | Microsoft | Microsoft |
| Verdict | The Hermes series is the closest thing open-source AI has to a house brand: Llama- and Mistral-based fine-tunes known for strong instruction-following, steerability and refusal rates far below the big labs' defaults. Her... |
OpenChat earned its reputation honestly: the 7B OpenChat 3.5 traded blows with early-2023 ChatGPT on public benchmarks thanks to C-RLFT, a training method that squeezes signal out of mixed-quality data, all under Apache... |
Orca is a research programme, not a product. The famous original model was never released; the downloadable Orca 2 checkpoints (7B/13B, Llama-2-based) carry Microsoft's research-only license, ruling out commercial deploy... |
WizardLM popularised Evol-Instruct — automatically evolving training instructions into harder variants — and its open models punched above their weight in 2023–24. The family (WizardLM, WizardCoder, WizardMath) remains f... |
| 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.