Shisa.ai vs PLaMo (Preferred Networks) vs ELYZA vs Rakuten AI 3.0
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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PLaMo (Preferred Networks)
PFN's from-scratch Japanese LLM, now in Japan's government AI stack
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ELYZA
Japan's Japanese-first LLM — from U Tokyo's Matsuo Lab, backed by KDDI
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Rakuten AI 3.0
Japan's largest homegrown LLM — government-backed, open-weight, built...
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| RECATOOLS Score | 6.3 / 10 | 6.8 / 10 | 7.4 / 10 | 6.8 / 10 |
| Capability | — | |||
| Value for money | — | |||
| Ease of use | — | |||
| ASEAN readiness | — | |||
| API quality | — | |||
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium | Enterprise | Open Source |
| Free tier | — | — | Free demo ended May 2026; open-weight models freely downloadable on Hugging Face | Free — Apache 2.0 open-weight model, download and self-host via Hugging Face |
| Paid from | — | — | Enterprise contract only — no public pricing; contact sales via elyza.ai | No paid tier — open-weight, self-hosted only |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Users | — | — | ~110K users in 11 days at ELYZA Pencil launch (2022); enterprise B2B focus since | — |
| Founded | — | — | 2018 | 1997 |
| Maker | — | — | KDDI Corporation | Rakuten Group, Inc. |
| 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... |
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... |
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... |
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... |
| 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.