Baichuan 百川智能 vs Z.ai (Zhipu GLM) vs Yi Model vs Kimi 月之暗面
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Baichuan 百川智能
Open-weights LLM lab founded by Sogou's Wang Xiaochuan
Visit
|
Z.ai (Zhipu GLM)
Open-weights frontier LLM family from Zhipu AI
Visit
|
Yi Model
01.AI's Yi model family — frontier development paused, company pivoted...
Visit
|
Kimi 月之暗面
Long-context chat assistant from Moonshot AI
Visit
|
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RECATOOLS Score | 6.4 / 10 | 7.6 / 10 | 6.8 / 10 | 7.3 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium | Open Source | Freemium |
| Free tier | — | GLM-4.7-Flash and GLM-4.5-Flash are free for all registered users | Free to download | — |
| Paid from | — | Lite ~$10/mo, Pro ~$30/mo, Max ~$80/mo (quarterly billing); API from $1.20/1M tokens | — | 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 | — | — | 500k+ downloads | 36M+ MAU (as of late 2024) |
| Founded | 2023 | 2019 | — | 2023 |
| Maker | — | — | 01.AI | — |
| Verdict | Baichuan Intelligence develops a respected family of large language models with both open-weight releases and a hosted assistant, performing strongly on Chinese-language reasoning and increasingly on bilingual tasks. For... |
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... |
Yi is the LLM family from 01.AI, offered as open weights with notably strong bilingual Chinese-English performance that made it one of the more respected open-model lineages of 2023–24. For teams needing solid Chinese-la... |
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.