Shisa.ai vs ELYZA
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Shisa.ai
Three-person Tokyo lab, open Japanese LLMs beating far bigger models
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ELYZA
Japan's Japanese-first LLM — from U Tokyo's Matsuo Lab, backed by KDDI
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| RECATOOLS Score | 6.3 / 10 | 7.4 / 10 |
| Capability | ||
| Value for money | ||
| Ease of use | ||
| ASEAN readiness | ||
| API quality | ||
| Pricing | Freemium | Enterprise |
| Free tier | — | Free demo ended May 2026; open-weight models freely downloadable on Hugging Face |
| Paid from | — | Enterprise contract only — no public pricing; contact sales via elyza.ai |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✗ |
| Users | — | ~110K users in 11 days at ELYZA Pencil launch (2022); enterprise B2B focus since |
| Founded | — | 2018 |
| Maker | — | KDDI Corporation |
| Verdict | Shisa.ai is the rare small lab whose benchmark claims hold up on inspection: its 405B model pulled over a million Hugging Face downloads in its first month, and the newer, much smaller V2.1-14B reportedly beats the older... |
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... |
| 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.