iFlytek Spark 讯飞星火 vs Ernie Bot 文心一言 (Baidu) vs Tencent Hunyuan 腾讯混元 vs Z.ai (Zhipu GLM)
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
iFlytek Spark 讯飞星火
iFlytek's flagship LLM — strong voice + Chinese capability
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Ernie Bot 文心一言 (Baidu)
Baidu's ERNIE-powered assistant for chat, writing, painting and search...
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Tencent Hunyuan 腾讯混元
Tencent's frontier LLM family powering WeChat & QQ AI
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Z.ai (Zhipu GLM)
Open-weights frontier LLM family from Zhipu AI
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| RECATOOLS Score | 6.2 / 10 | 6.8 / 10 | 6.5 / 10 | 7.6 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium | Freemium | Freemium |
| Free tier | — | — | — | GLM-4.7-Flash and GLM-4.5-Flash are free for all registered users |
| Paid from | Free tier available; paid/enterprise plans and API via iFlytek Open Platform (xinghuo.xfyun.cn) | — | — | Lite ~$10/mo, Pro ~$30/mo, Max ~$80/mo (quarterly billing); API from $1.20/1M tokens |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Users | Not publicly disclosed as a single figure; iFlytek reports its medical assistant has logged over 1 | ~200 million monthly active users (2026) | — | — |
| Founded | 2023 | — | 2023 | 2019 |
| Maker | — | — | — | — |
| Verdict | Spark is the speech company's LLM, and it shows: Mandarin understanding, voice interaction and multimodal speech tasks are where iFlytek's two decades of speech-recognition heritage pay off. The 2026 X2 generation (a 293... |
As Baidu's flagship assistant, Ernie Bot benefits from deep integration with Baidu Search and the wider Baidu ecosystem, and it's genuinely competitive: ERNIE 5.1 landed #1 among Chinese models and top-5 globally on LMAr... |
Hunyuan is Tencent's in-house family of large language and reasoning models (including the T1 reasoning line) that powers its consumer apps and is offered via Tencent Cloud. It is a credible frontier-class model for Chin... |
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... |
| 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.