Kakao Brain (KoGPT) vs HyperCLOVA X vs LG EXAONE vs Solar LLM
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
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HyperCLOVA X
Naver's Korea-first sovereign large language model
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LG EXAONE
Korea's open vision-language AI — EXAONE 4.5 beats GPT-5-mini on STEM
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Solar LLM
Upstage's Solar LLMs — Korea's frontier family, now Solar Pro 3
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| RECATOOLS Score | 6.2 / 10 | 7.8 / 10 | 7.8 / 10 | 7 / 10 |
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| Value for money | ||||
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| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Open Source | Paid | Freemium | Open Source |
| Free tier | Weights and code free for non-commercial research (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 + Apache 2.0) | Open SEED model weights on Hugging Face | Weights free for research, academic, and educational use via Hugging Face (NC licence) | Free to download |
| Paid from | No commercial API offered; contact [email protected] for licensing | Enterprise via Naver Cloud / CLOVA Studio (custom) | Commercial API via FriendliAI Serverless Endpoints (pay-per-token; contact FriendliAI for pricing) | — |
| Has API | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | Thousands of Korean NLP researchers; 11 active Hugging Face Spaces | Embedded across Naver's search and shopping services in Korea | B2B-focused; deployed internally across LG product lines; research community access via Hugging Face | 200k+ downloads |
| Founded | 2017 | — | 2020 | 2020 |
| Maker | Kakao Corp | Naver (Naver Cloud) | LG Group (LG AI Research) | Upstage AI |
| Verdict | KoGPT earns its place as the pioneering open-source Korean LLM — it filled a genuine gap in 2021 and remains a cited baseline in peer-reviewed Korean NLP research. The 6B-parameter model delivers competitive zero-shot an... |
HyperCLOVA X is Korea's answer to the frontier labs — an LLM tuned for Korean language and culture rather than translated into it, with a Korean-optimized tokenizer that runs faster and cheaper on Korean text. THINK, DAS... |
EXAONE 4.5, out in April 2026, moves LG AI Research's hybrid reasoning line into vision: a 33B model (32B language backbone plus a 1.2B vision encoder) that reads images alongside text and averages 77.3 across five STEM... |
Solar is the rare 2023 open-weights story that grew into a real product line. The Apache-2.0 Solar 10.7B and its depth up-scaling trick topped the Hugging Face leaderboard in December 2023; the commercial line then kept... |
| 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.