Looking for a free alternative to EXAONE (LG AI Research)? Here are 9 notable open models worth trying — 9 with a free tier. EXAONE (LG AI Research) itself is free.
| Tool | EXAONE (LG AI Research) (you searched) | Qwen (Alibaba) | DeepSeek Models | Mistral Open Models (Magistral, Devstral, Voxtral) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing | free | free | free | free |
| Best for | EXAONE 4.5: LG's first open-weight vision-language model for industrial use cases | Open Qwen3.x family from phone-sized to multi-trillion-parameter MoE, Apache 2.0 | DeepSeek V4-Pro and V4-Flash open-weight MoE models, MIT-licensed | Open-weight Mistral Medium 3.5, Small 4 and Large 3 general models |
| Visit | Open ↗ | Open ↗ | Open ↗ | Open ↗ |
Qwen (Alibaba) is the closest free alternative to EXAONE (LG AI Research): same Notable Open Models sub-category, and it is free. Open Qwen3.x family from phone-sized to multi-trillion-parameter MoE, Apache 2.0
Yes — 9 of the 9 alternatives listed here are free or freemium: Qwen (Alibaba), DeepSeek Models, Mistral Open Models (Magistral, Devstral, Voxtral), OLMo (Ai2), Hunyuan (Tencent). None of them are paid-only.
EXAONE (LG AI Research) is free. There is no paid plan attached to it in the catalog.
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.
✦ WhyA EXAONE (LG AI Research) alternative — Open Qwen3.x family from phone-sized to multi-trillion-parameter MoE, Apache 2.0.
✦ WhyA EXAONE (LG AI Research) alternative — DeepSeek V4-Pro and V4-Flash open-weight MoE models, MIT-licensed.
✦ WhyA EXAONE (LG AI Research) alternative — Open-weight Mistral Medium 3.5, Small 4 and Large 3 general models.
✦ WhyA EXAONE (LG AI Research) alternative — Only major model family shipping full pretraining data (Dolma), code and intermediate checkpoints, not just weights.
✦ WhyA EXAONE (LG AI Research) alternative — Open-weight Hunyuan Hy3 and Hy4-preview flagship text models.
✦ WhyA EXAONE (LG AI Research) alternative — Falcon-H1 hybrid Transformer-Mamba family for efficient long-context inference.
✦ WhyA EXAONE (LG AI Research) alternative — MiniMax's open-weight M-series: M3 multimodal MoE with very long context, plus M2.x agentic-coding checkpoints.
✦ WhyA EXAONE (LG AI Research) alternative — MiMo-V2.6-Pro (1T parameters) and V2.6-Flash (311B) open-weight reasoning and agent models.
✦ WhyA EXAONE (LG AI Research) alternative — Step-3.7-Flash open multimodal model with FP8, NVFP4 and GGUF builds.