Tencent Hunyuan 腾讯混元 vs Z.ai (Zhipu GLM) vs Qwen vs DeepSeek
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Tencent Hunyuan 腾讯混元
Tencent's frontier LLM family powering WeChat & QQ AI
Visit
|
Z.ai (Zhipu GLM)
Open-weights frontier LLM family from Zhipu AI
Visit
|
Qwen
Alibaba's LLM family: open Qwen3 weights plus closed Qwen3.7-Max
Visit
|
DeepSeek
China's frontier open-weight LLM lab — now shipping the V4 family at a...
Visit
|
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RECATOOLS Score | 6.5 / 10 | 7.6 / 10 | 8.6 / 10 | 8.2 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium | Open Source | Open Source |
| Free tier | — | GLM-4.7-Flash and GLM-4.5-Flash are free for all registered users | Open-weight Qwen3 models free to download and self-host | Free access at chat.deepseek.com; open weights self-hostable |
| Paid from | — | Lite ~$10/mo, Pro ~$30/mo, Max ~$80/mo (quarterly billing); API from $1.20/1M tokens | Qwen3 Max preview API priced per-token on Alibaba Cloud | V4-Flash $0.14/$0.28; V4-Pro $0.435/$0.87 per 1M tokens (now permanent, not promo) |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | — | — | Consumer app ~203M MAU (April 2026), #3 globally | ~130M monthly active users (late 2025) |
| Founded | 2023 | 2019 | — | 2023 |
| Maker | — | — | Alibaba Group | High-Flyer |
| Verdict | Hunyuan is Tencent's in-house family of large language and reasoning models (including the T1 reasoning line) that powers its consumer apps and is offered via Tencent Cloud. It is a credible frontier-class model for Chin... |
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... |
Qwen is Alibaba's flagship LLM family and a cornerstone of the open-weight ecosystem — the Qwen3 line ships freely on Hugging Face from small dense models up to large MoE sizes. Capability is frontier-adjacent on coding,... |
DeepSeek is the Chinese lab whose open-weight models repeatedly shock the market by matching far costlier frontier systems at a fraction of the price. The 2026 V4 family (V4-Pro and the cheaper V4-Flash, both 1M-context)... |
| 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.