Qwen vs Solar (Upstage)
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Qwen
Alibaba Cloud's LLM family, open weights through to the Qwen3.8-Max fl...
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Solar (Upstage)
Upstage's Korean-strong LLMs: Solar Pro 4, Mini 4 and open Solar Open...
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| RECATOOLS Score | 8.6 / 10 | 7 / 10 |
| Capability | ||
| Value for money | ||
| Ease of use | ||
| ASEAN readiness | ||
| API quality | ||
| Pricing | Freemium | Usage_based |
| Free tier | Open weights to self-host; free Qwen Chat; 1M free tokens per model for 90 days in Model Studio's Singapore region | Solar Open 2 and Solar Open 100B weights free to download (Upstage Solar License, commercial use allowed); each Studio agent includes 10 free runs |
| Paid from | From $0.03 per million input tokens (qwen3.7-flash, prompts up to 32K, Singapore region) | Solar Mini 4 from $0.10/$0.40 per 1M tokens; Solar Pro 4 $0.30/$1.20 |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | Consumer app ~203M MAU (April 2026), #3 globally | 200k+ downloads |
| Founded | 2023 | 2020 |
| Maker | Alibaba Cloud | Upstage Co., Ltd. |
| Verdict | Qwen is the most practical open-weight family to build on in 2026: Apache 2.0 models from under a billion to hundreds of billions of parameters, and now even the Max-tier flagship available to download. Hosted pricing in... |
Solar has matured into a credible model family, with a strong Korean-language flagship, a cheap small model and genuinely capable open weights that can be self-hosted commercially. Its benchmark wins are reported by Upst... |
| 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.