WangchanX vs Typhoon (ไต้ฝุ่น) by SCB DataX vs SEA-LION vs OpenThaiGPT
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
WangchanX
Thailand's flagship open-source Thai LLM family — fine-tuning pipeline...
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SEA-LION
Open-source LLM family for 11+ Southeast Asian languages
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OpenThaiGPT
Open-source Thai-centric large language model developed by Thailand's...
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| RECATOOLS Score | 7.2 / 10 | 7.3 / 10 | 8.2 / 10 | 7 / 10 |
| Capability | — | |||
| Value for money | — | |||
| Ease of use | — | |||
| ASEAN readiness | — | |||
| API quality | — | |||
| Pricing | Open Source | Freemium | Open Source | Open Source |
| Free tier | Fully free — all models, datasets, and code are Apache 2.0 open source | — | All weights free on Hugging Face; free API via playground.sea-lion.ai (10 req/min) | Free, Apache 2.0 licensed model weights available to download. |
| Paid from | N/A — no paid tier; self-host on own compute | — | Open weights, free to self-host; hosted access via cloud providers | — |
| Has API | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | 100K+ monthly downloads (WangchanBERTa on Hugging Face) | — | Hundreds to low-thousands of monthly Hugging Face downloads per variant | — |
| Founded | 2019 | — | — | — |
| Maker | VISTEC-depa AI Research Institute of Thailand (VISTEC + Digital Economy Promotion Agency) | SCB DataX | AI Singapore (AISG) — national programme hosted by the National University of Singapore, funded by Singapore NRF | AI Entrepreneur Association of Thailand (AIEAT) |
| Verdict | WangchanX delivers exceptional value for Thai-language AI work: it is the only comprehensive, fully open-source Thai LLM stack with a coherent pipeline from pre-training data through instruction tuning, alignment (DPO/OR... |
Typhoon remains the default pick for Thai-language work: the Hugging Face suite jumped from 330K to 6M downloads in 2025, and the free API handled about 14 million calls and 320 million tokens last year. It's wider than... |
SEA-LION is the most credible open-weight LLM built specifically for Southeast Asia -- nothing else in the open-source space covers this many regional languages this well. Backed by Singapore's National Research Foundati... |
What this is for: A Thai-centric open LLM for chat and instruction-following tuned specifically for the Thai language. Who this is for: Thai developers, businesses and researchers wanting a permissively licensed local-l... |
| 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.