Rakuten AI 3.0 vs ELYZA
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Rakuten AI 3.0
Japan's largest homegrown LLM — government-backed, open-weight, built...
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ELYZA
Japan's Japanese-first LLM — from U Tokyo's Matsuo Lab, backed by KDDI
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| RECATOOLS Score | 6.8 / 10 | 7.4 / 10 |
| Capability | — | |
| Value for money | — | |
| Ease of use | — | |
| ASEAN readiness | — | |
| API quality | — | |
| Pricing | Open Source | Enterprise |
| Free tier | Free — Apache 2.0 open-weight model, download and self-host via Hugging Face | Free demo ended May 2026; open-weight models freely downloadable on Hugging Face |
| Paid from | No paid tier — open-weight, self-hosted only | Enterprise contract only — no public pricing; contact sales via elyza.ai |
| Has API | ✗ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✗ |
| Users | — | ~110K users in 11 days at ELYZA Pencil launch (2022); enterprise B2B focus since |
| Founded | 1997 | 2018 |
| Maker | Rakuten Group, Inc. | KDDI Corporation |
| Verdict | What this is for: running a genuinely capable Japanese-English bilingual LLM for writing, coding, and document work, either self-hosted or as the model behind Rakuten's own consumer products. It's Japan's most prominent... |
ELYZA has the cleanest academic-to-enterprise pipeline among Japan's domestic LLM shops: University of Tokyo Matsuo Lab research, a 2024 KDDI majority buy-in (53.4% combined stake), and production deployments that aren't... |
| Full review → | Full review → |
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Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.