Rakuten AI 3.0 vs ELYZA vs PLaMo (Preferred Networks) vs NTT tsuzumi

A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.

	Rakuten AI 3.0 Japan's largest homegrown LLM — government-backed, open-weight, built... Visit	ELYZA Japan's Japanese-first LLM — from U Tokyo's Matsuo Lab, backed by KDDI Visit	PLaMo (Preferred Networks) PFN's from-scratch Japanese LLM, now in Japan's government AI stack Visit	NTT tsuzumi Japan's sovereign lightweight LLM — enterprise-grade Japanese AI on a... Visit
RECATOOLS Score	6.8 / 10	7.4 / 10	6.8 / 10	7.2 / 10
Capability	—	8	7.5	7.5
Value for money	—	6.5	6.5	7.8
Ease of use	—	6.5	5.5	5.5
ASEAN readiness	—	4.5	4.5	6
API quality	—	7	7	6.5
Pricing	Open Source	Enterprise	Freemium	Enterprise
Free tier	Free — Apache 2.0 open-weight model, download and self-host via Hugging Face	Free demo ended May 2026; open-weight models freely downloadable on Hugging Face	—	None — enterprise and government contracts only; no public free tier
Paid from	No paid tier — open-weight, self-hosted only	Enterprise contract only — no public pricing; contact sales via elyza.ai	—	Contact NTT / NTT DATA (negotiated B2B); pay-as-you-go via Azure MaaS (token-based)
Has API	✗	✓	✓	✓
Open source	✓	✗	✗	✗
Free to use	✓	✗	✓	✗
Users	—	~110K users in 11 days at ELYZA Pencil launch (2022); enterprise B2B focus since	—	Not disclosed
Founded	1997	2018	—	1952
Maker	Rakuten Group, Inc.	KDDI Corporation	—	Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT)
Verdict	What this is for: running a genuinely capable Japanese-English bilingual LLM for writing, coding, and document work, either self-hosted or as the model behind Rakuten's own consumer products. It's Japan's most prominent...	ELYZA has the cleanest academic-to-enterprise pipeline among Japan's domestic LLM shops: University of Tokyo Matsuo Lab research, a 2024 KDDI majority buy-in (53.4% combined stake), and production deployments that aren't...	PLaMo is one of the few Japanese LLM efforts built genuinely from scratch rather than fine-tuned on a Western base, and it's now backed by government validation: the Digital Agency rolled PLaMo Translate into its interna...	NTT tsuzumi 2 is a credible sovereign-AI play, not just a brand exercise. The single-H100 inference claim checks out across multiple independent reports, and being tapped for Japan's Digital Agency "Gennai" trial — rolli...
	Full review →	Full review →	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.