LG EXAONE vs Maritaca AI (Sabiá) vs AI4Bharat vs LightOn (Paradigm)
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
LG EXAONE
Korea's open vision-language AI — EXAONE 4.5 beats GPT-5-mini on STEM
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Maritaca AI (Sabiá)
Brazilian Portuguese LLMs beating GPT on Brazil's bar exam and ENEM
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AI4Bharat
Open-source Indic NLP suite from IIT Madras — translating, transcribin...
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LightOn (Paradigm)
Sovereign on-prem GenAI platform for regulated European enterprises
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| RECATOOLS Score | 7.8 / 10 | 6.4 / 10 | 8.2 / 10 | 6.1 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium | Open Source | Enterprise |
| Free tier | Weights free for research, academic, and educational use via Hugging Face (NC licence) | — | All models free — MIT/Apache 2.0 via HuggingFace and GitHub | — |
| Paid from | Commercial API via FriendliAI Serverless Endpoints (pay-per-token; contact FriendliAI for pricing) | — | No paid tier; self-host or use Bhashini public API (free) | — |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Users | B2B-focused; deployed internally across LG product lines; research community access via Hugging Face | — | Datasets used by ~every Indian Indic voice AI startup; 1.7K HF followers | — |
| Founded | 2020 | — | 2019 | — |
| Maker | LG Group (LG AI Research) | — | IIT Madras (Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat) | — |
| Verdict | 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... |
Maritaca started in October 2022, a month before ChatGPT, as a Unicamp research spinout under CEO Rodrigo Nogueira, and it's stayed narrowly focused: Portuguese, Brazilian law, and Brazilian exams. Sabiá models are bench... |
AI4Bharat's IndicTrans2 is the gold-standard open-source translation model for India's 22 scheduled languages, and there is no credible free alternative that matches its breadth or benchmark performance across low-resour... |
LightOn's pitch is straightforward: keep the model and the data on your own infrastructure. Paradigm bundles RAG, agents and access to curated open and in-house models behind one API, deployable on-prem or hybrid — the o... |
| 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.