Solar (Upstage) vs Mistral AI vs Qwen vs Llama
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Solar (Upstage)
Upstage's Korean-strong LLMs: Solar Pro 4, Mini 4 and open Solar Open...
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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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Llama
Meta's downloadable LLM family, last updated with Llama 4 in April 202...
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| RECATOOLS Score | 7 / 10 | 8.4 / 10 | 8.6 / 10 | 8.3 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Usage_based | Freemium | Freemium | Open Source |
| Free tier | Solar Open 2 and Solar Open 100B weights free to download (Upstage Solar License, commercial use allowed); each Studio agent includes 10 free runs | 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 | Free weight downloads (Llama 2, 3.x and 4) under Meta's Llama community licences, after accepting the licence |
| Paid from | Solar Mini 4 from $0.10/$0.40 per 1M tokens; Solar Pro 4 $0.30/$1.20 | $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 | 200k+ downloads | 500k+ API users | Consumer app ~203M MAU (April 2026), #3 globally | 10m+ downloads |
| Founded | 2020 | 2023 | 2023 | 2023 |
| Maker | Upstage Co., Ltd. | Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, Timothee Lacroix | Alibaba Cloud | Meta Platforms |
| Verdict | Solar has matured into a credible model family, with a strong Korean-language flagship, a cheap small model and genuinely capable open weights that can be self-hosted commercially. Its benchmark wins are reported by Upst... |
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... |
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... |
| 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.