StepFun 阶跃星辰 vs Z.ai (Zhipu GLM) vs MiniMax Hailuo 海螺AI vs Baichuan 百川智能
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
StepFun 阶跃星辰
Chinese multimodal frontier-model lab founded by Microsoft Research ve...
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Z.ai (Zhipu GLM)
Open-weights frontier LLM family from Zhipu AI
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MiniMax Hailuo 海螺AI
MiniMax's consumer AI suite — chat, voice, video, now a public company
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Baichuan 百川智能
Open-weights LLM lab founded by Sogou's Wang Xiaochuan
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| RECATOOLS Score | 6.6 / 10 | 7.6 / 10 | 7.3 / 10 | 6.4 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium | Freemium | Freemium |
| Free tier | — | GLM-4.7-Flash and GLM-4.5-Flash are free for all registered users | — | — |
| Paid from | — | Lite ~$10/mo, Pro ~$30/mo, Max ~$80/mo (quarterly billing); API from $1.20/1M tokens | Free tier (a few short watermarked clips/day, no card) | — |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | — | — | Android app 13M+ installs, ~70K ratings (~4.06/5 on Google Play) | — |
| Founded | 2023 | 2019 | 2021 | 2023 |
| Maker | — | — | — | — |
| Verdict | StepFun (阶跃星辰) is a well-funded Chinese AI lab building capable multimodal Step models, with an OpenAI-compatible API, realtime voice tooling and recent open-source releases such as Step 3.7 Flash aimed at agentic us... |
The GLM series is still the strongest value play among frontier-adjacent APIs, and 2026 made Zhipu impossible to ignore: a January Hong Kong IPO (the first listed LLM company), GLM-5 in February, and GLM-5.2 in June with... |
MiniMax is a public company now — listed in Hong Kong in January 2026 — and Hailuo is its consumer face: chat, voice, and the video generator that keeps topping physics benchmarks. Hailuo 2.3 produces motion quality West... |
Baichuan Intelligence develops a respected family of large language models with both open-weight releases and a hosted assistant, performing strongly on Chinese-language reasoning and increasingly on bilingual tasks. For... |
| 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.