Z.ai (Zhipu GLM) vs DeepSeek vs Qwen vs Kimi 月之暗面
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Z.ai (Zhipu GLM)
Open-weights frontier LLM family from Zhipu AI
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DeepSeek
China's frontier open-weight LLM lab — now shipping the V4 family at a...
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Qwen
Alibaba's LLM family: open Qwen3 weights plus closed Qwen3.7-Max
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Kimi 月之暗面
Long-context chat assistant from Moonshot AI
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| RECATOOLS Score | 7.6 / 10 | 8.2 / 10 | 8.6 / 10 | 7.3 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Freemium | Open Source | Open Source | Freemium |
| Free tier | GLM-4.7-Flash and GLM-4.5-Flash are free for all registered users | Free access at chat.deepseek.com; open weights self-hostable | Open-weight Qwen3 models free to download and self-host | — |
| Paid from | Lite ~$10/mo, Pro ~$30/mo, Max ~$80/mo (quarterly billing); API from $1.20/1M tokens | V4-Flash $0.14/$0.28; V4-Pro $0.435/$0.87 per 1M tokens (now permanent, not promo) | Qwen3 Max preview API priced per-token on Alibaba Cloud | API from $0.95/$4.00 per M tokens (input/output; OpenRouter ~$0.75/$3.50); free web tier |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | — | ~130M monthly active users (late 2025) | Consumer app ~203M MAU (April 2026), #3 globally | 36M+ MAU (as of late 2024) |
| Founded | 2019 | 2023 | — | 2023 |
| Maker | — | High-Flyer | Alibaba Group | — |
| Verdict | The GLM series is still the strongest value play among frontier-adjacent APIs, and 2026 made Zhipu impossible to ignore: a January Hong Kong IPO (the first listed LLM company), GLM-5 in February, and GLM-5.2 in June with... |
DeepSeek is the Chinese lab whose open-weight models repeatedly shock the market by matching far costlier frontier systems at a fraction of the price. The 2026 V4 family (V4-Pro and the cheaper V4-Flash, both 1M-context)... |
Qwen is Alibaba's flagship LLM family and a cornerstone of the open-weight ecosystem — the Qwen3 line ships freely on Hugging Face from small dense models up to large MoE sizes. Capability is frontier-adjacent on coding,... |
Kimi is Moonshot AI's consumer front-end for the open-weight K-series models, and in 2026 it's no longer a China-only story: kimi.com, the Kimi Code CLI and an English API platform give it a real international footprint,... |
| 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.