Best free ERNIE 4.5 Open Models (Baidu) alternatives

Looking for a free alternative to ERNIE 4.5 Open Models (Baidu)? Here are 9 notable open models worth trying — 9 with a free tier. ERNIE 4.5 Open Models (Baidu) itself is free.

ToolERNIE 4.5 Open Models (Baidu) (you searched)Llama (Meta)Qwen (Alibaba)DeepSeek Models
Pricingfreefreefreefree
Best forERNIE-4.5 family including 21B-A3B Thinking and VL-424B-A47B multimodal MoEMeta's flagship open-weight family (Llama 4)Open Qwen3.x family from phone-sized to multi-trillion-parameter MoE, Apache 2.0DeepSeek V4-Pro and V4-Flash open-weight MoE models, MIT-licensed
VisitOpen ↗Open ↗Open ↗Open ↗

ERNIE 4.5 Open Models (Baidu) alternatives — straight answers

What is the best free alternative to ERNIE 4.5 Open Models (Baidu)?

Llama (Meta) is the closest free alternative to ERNIE 4.5 Open Models (Baidu): same Notable Open Models sub-category, and it is free. Meta's flagship open-weight family (Llama 4)

Are there free ERNIE 4.5 Open Models (Baidu) alternatives?

Yes — 9 of the 9 alternatives listed here are free or freemium: Llama (Meta), Qwen (Alibaba), DeepSeek Models, Gemma (Google), GPT-OSS (OpenAI). None of them are paid-only.

Is ERNIE 4.5 Open Models (Baidu) free?

ERNIE 4.5 Open Models (Baidu) is free. There is no paid plan attached to it in the catalog.

How were these ERNIE 4.5 Open Models (Baidu) alternatives chosen?

They are the other tools in Notable Open Models, then the rest of AI Models & Local Execution, ordered free tiers first and capped at 9. There is no sponsorship and no paid placement in that ordering — only the pricing tier decides.

All ERNIE 4.5 Open Models (Baidu) alternatives

Browse Notable Open Models →

Llama (Meta)

Notable Open Models
free

✦ WhyA ERNIE 4.5 Open Models (Baidu) alternative — Meta's flagship open-weight family (Llama 4).

  • Meta's flagship open-weight family (Llama 4)
  • Multimodal and long-context variants
  • Run locally or via any host
  • Free, permissive license

Qwen (Alibaba)

Notable Open Models
free

✦ WhyA ERNIE 4.5 Open Models (Baidu) alternative — Open Qwen3.x family from phone-sized to multi-trillion-parameter MoE, Apache 2.0.

  • Open Qwen3.x family from phone-sized to multi-trillion-parameter MoE, Apache 2.0
  • Qwen3.6 mid-size models suit agentic coding on one high-memory machine
  • Small Qwen3.5 sizes run on phones and laptops
  • Free weights on Hugging Face and ModelScope

DeepSeek Models

Notable Open Models
free

✦ WhyA ERNIE 4.5 Open Models (Baidu) alternative — DeepSeek V4-Pro and V4-Flash open-weight MoE models, MIT-licensed.

  • DeepSeek V4-Pro and V4-Flash open-weight MoE models, MIT-licensed
  • Very long context with reasoning and non-reasoning modes
  • Successors to the V3 and R1 lines
  • Free weights plus free web chat

Gemma (Google)

Notable Open Models
free

✦ WhyA ERNIE 4.5 Open Models (Baidu) alternative — Google's lightweight open models (Gemma 4).

  • Google's lightweight open models (Gemma 4)
  • Runs in as little as 16GB RAM
  • On-device and multimodal variants
  • Free and open

GPT-OSS (OpenAI)

Notable Open Models
free

✦ WhyA ERNIE 4.5 Open Models (Baidu) alternative — OpenAI's Apache-2.0 open-weight reasoning models (120B and 20B).

  • OpenAI's Apache-2.0 open-weight reasoning models (120B and 20B)
  • Run locally or self-host, with configurable reasoning effort
  • Safeguard variants for policy-based content classification

Pleias

Notable Open Models
free

✦ WhyA ERNIE 4.5 Open Models (Baidu) alternative — Fully open-weight, open-dataset small language models (350M-3B) explicitly built for EU AI Act compliance.

  • Fully open-weight, open-dataset small language models (350M-3B) explicitly built for EU AI Act compliance
  • Trained exclusively on the 2-trillion-token open Common Corpus, not scraped/licensed text
  • Purpose-built RAG models (Pleias-RAG-350M/1B) with built-in citation tracking, Apache 2.0 licensed

✦ WhyA ERNIE 4.5 Open Models (Baidu) alternative — Open-weight Mistral Medium 3.5, Small 4 and Large 3 general models.

  • Open-weight Mistral Medium 3.5, Small 4 and Large 3 general models
  • Devstral for coding agents and Magistral for visible reasoning
  • Voxtral open-weights speech models for transcription and voice agents

IBM Granite

Notable Open Models
free

✦ WhyA ERNIE 4.5 Open Models (Baidu) alternative — Apache 2.0 licensed enterprise-grade model family.

  • Apache 2.0 licensed enterprise-grade model family
  • Hybrid Mamba/transformer architecture (Granite 4) for lower memory footprint
  • Built-in focus on governance, provenance and enterprise compliance

OLMo (Ai2)

Notable Open Models
free

✦ WhyA ERNIE 4.5 Open Models (Baidu) alternative — Only major model family shipping full pretraining data (Dolma), code and intermediate checkpoints, not just weights.

  • Only major model family shipping full pretraining data (Dolma), code and intermediate checkpoints, not just weights
  • Olmo 3 ships Base, Think, and Instruct variants at 7B/32B
  • OlmoCore training framework and Open Instruct pipeline are also open source

ERNIE 4.5 Open Models (Baidu) head-to-head