SEA-LION vs Llama vs Mistral AI vs Qwen
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
SEA-LION
AI Singapore's open-weight LLMs tuned for Southeast Asian languages
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Llama
Meta's downloadable LLM family, last updated with Llama 4 in April 202...
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Mistral AI
Paris model lab with open weights, cheap APIs and the Vibe agent
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Qwen
Alibaba Cloud's LLM family, open weights through to the Qwen3.8-Max fl...
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| RECATOOLS Score | 8.2 / 10 | 8.3 / 10 | 8.4 / 10 | 8.6 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Open Source | Open Source | Freemium | Freemium |
| Free tier | All weights free on Hugging Face; a free trial API key at 10 requests a minute for proofs of concept | Free weight downloads (Llama 2, 3.x and 4) under Meta's Llama community licences, after accepting the licence | Vibe Free: limited messages, web searches and coding sessions, basic image generation, 100+ connectors; Apache 2.0 weights free to self-host | Open weights to self-host; free Qwen Chat; 1M free tokens per model for 90 days in Model Studio's Singapore region |
| Paid from | No paid tier: production runs on cloud partners at their own rates | — | $14.99/month (Vibe Pro, excluding tax); API from $0.10 per million tokens | From $0.03 per million input tokens (qwen3.7-flash, prompts up to 32K, Singapore region) |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | Hundreds to low-thousands of monthly Hugging Face downloads per variant | 10m+ downloads | 500k+ API users | Consumer app ~203M MAU (April 2026), #3 globally |
| Founded | 2023 | 2023 | 2023 | 2023 |
| Maker | AI Singapore | Meta Platforms | Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, Timothee Lacroix | Alibaba Cloud |
| Verdict | 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... |
Llama 2 and 3 made Meta's family the default starting point for self-hosted and fine-tuned models, and the weights from Llama 2 through Llama 4 remain free to download from Hugging Face and Kaggle. Llama 4 Scout and Mave... |
Mistral is a good choice when you want models you can host yourself or buy cheaply by the token: Small 4, Large 3 and the Ministral 3 models are Apache 2.0, and API rates sit well below most US frontier labs. The Vibe ag... |
Qwen is the most practical open-weight family to build on in 2026: Apache 2.0 models from under a billion to hundreds of billions of parameters, and now even the Max-tier flagship available to download. Hosted pricing in... |
| 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.