MERaLiON vs SEA-LION vs MaLLaM vs Pathumma LLM
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
MERaLiON
Singapore's national audio-language models for Southeast Asian speech
Visit
|
SEA-LION
AI Singapore's open-weight LLMs tuned for Southeast Asian languages
Visit
|
MaLLaM
Mesolitica's from-scratch Malaysian models, free to download but unlic...
Visit
|
Pathumma LLM
Thailand's government-built Thai model family for text, documents and...
Visit
|
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RECATOOLS Score | 7 / 10 | 8.2 / 10 | 6.5 / 10 | 6.5 / 10 |
| Capability | — | — | — | |
| Value for money | — | — | — | |
| Ease of use | — | — | — | |
| ASEAN readiness | — | — | — | |
| API quality | — | — | — | |
| Pricing | Open Source | Open Source | Free | Open Source |
| Free tier | Weights free on Hugging Face under the MERaLiON Public Licence; hosted API by registration with tier quotas, no prices published | All weights free on Hugging Face; a free trial API key at 10 requests a minute for proofs of concept | Weights free to download from Hugging Face, but no licence is declared on any MaLLaM model | Free model weights on Hugging Face, mostly Apache 2.0 but licences vary and two vision models declare none; API via AI for Thai with a key |
| Paid from | — | No paid tier: production runs on cloud partners at their own rates | — | — |
| Has API | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | — | Hundreds to low-thousands of monthly Hugging Face downloads per variant | — | — |
| Founded | 2024 | 2023 | 2023 | 2024 |
| Maker | A*STAR Institute of Advanced Intelligence and Computing (IAIC) | AI Singapore | Mesolitica | NECTEC (NSTDA) |
| Verdict | MERaLiON is a purpose-built option for Singapore-accented and code-switched speech: an end-to-end audio model that handles Singlish, Hokkien and Southeast Asian languages, with free weights and a hosted OpenAI-compatible... |
SEA-LION is the open model family to start with for Southeast Asian language work: regularly updated, MIT-licensed in its newest releases, and evaluated on SEA-HELM, the regional benchmark its own team maintains. The Sep... |
MaLLaM is a genuine from-scratch Malaysian model and a useful research artefact: base checkpoints from 1.1B to 5B parameters and instruction-tuned versions with a 20,480-token context, built on Malaysian text rather than... |
Pathumma is the most complete public-sector Thai AI stack available: open text, vision, OCR and speech models plus ready-made tools for Thai documents and meeting transcripts, kept active through 2026 with OCR, reasoning... |
| 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.