Zhipu Qingyan 智谱清言 (ChatGLM) vs Doubao 豆包 (ByteDance) vs Tencent Yuanbao 腾讯元宝 vs Kimi 月之暗面
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Zhipu Qingyan 智谱清言 (ChatGLM)
Zhipu's GLM-powered assistant, plus a GLM coding subscription
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Doubao 豆包 (ByteDance)
ByteDance's China-first AI assistant, free for daily use with paid pow...
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Tencent Yuanbao 腾讯元宝
Tencent's free consumer AI assistant, tied into WeChat
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Kimi 月之暗面
Moonshot AI's assistant and open-weight K3 model with a 1M-token conte...
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| RECATOOLS Score | 7.7 / 10 | 6.4 / 10 | 6.3 / 10 | 7.3 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium | Free | Freemium |
| Free tier | Qingyan web/app chat is free with sign-in; memberships and points packs are optional. Z.ai API: GLM-4.7-Flash, GLM-4.5-Flash and GLM-4.6V-Flash are free | Free consumer app: chat, search, writing, image generation and voice and video calls; expert and Office Task modes carry smaller quotas than paid tiers | Free on web, mobile and inside WeChat; Tencent publishes no consumer paid plan or usage limits | Adagio free plan: 1 concurrent agent task, 2 scheduled tasks, 2 projects and 500MB of project storage |
| Paid from | Coding Plan from $18/mo; Qingyan membership ¥79/mo (China App Store) | ¥68/month (专业版 Standard, or ¥688/year); API from $0.075 per M input tokens on BytePlus | — | $19/month (Plus, or $15/month billed annually); API from $0.95 in and $4.00 out per M tokens |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | — | Surpassed 100 million daily active users by late 2025 | ~57 million MAU (March 2026), 4th in China behind Doubao, Qianwen, and DeepSeek | 36M+ MAU (as of late 2024) |
| Founded | 2019 | 2023 | 2024 | 2023 |
| Maker | Z.AI Co., Ltd. (北京智谱华章科技股份有限公司) | ByteDance | Tencent Holdings | Moonshot AI (月之暗面) |
| Verdict | Qingyan is a capable, free Chinese AI assistant backed by Zhipu's strong GLM models, and the GLM Coding Plan offers an affordable alternative model for coding agents, with off-peak discounts in Singapore time. Prices hav... |
Doubao is the default AI assistant for Chinese-language users: QuestMobile puts it far ahead of Qwen and DeepSeek, everyday features are free, and the June 2026 Professional tiers (¥68 to ¥500 a month) add an agent mode... |
Yuanbao's strength is distribution: it sits next to WeChat, reads Official Account articles and summarises chat histories, and since July 2026 runs on Tencent's own Hy3 model with a free agent that produces slides, docum... |
Kimi earns its place on capability and price. K3 is the largest open-weight model available, with a one-million-token context and weights you can run yourself under a licence that only bites on very large commercial user... |
| 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.