The best free open-weight AI models (16)

Every option in the catalog for when you need to download weights you can inspect, fine-tune and self-host — 16 open-weight AI models, 16 of them free or freemium, with the pricing tier printed on every row.

16tools listed
16free or freemium
15with no paid plan at all
1sub-categories covered

Best Free Open-weight AI models — straight answers

What are the best free open-weight AI models?

Flocci AI Tools lists 16 of them, ordered free tiers first: DeepSeek Models, EXAONE (LG AI Research), Falcon (TII), Gemma (Google) and GPT-OSS (OpenAI). Every one of them is free or has a free tier. Each entry states what it uniquely does rather than a score.

Which of these are completely free?

15 on this page are marked fully free with no paid plan at all: DeepSeek Models, EXAONE (LG AI Research), Falcon (TII), Gemma (Google) and GPT-OSS (OpenAI). The remaining 1 are freemium, trial or paid, and each is labelled with its exact tier so nothing surprises you at sign-up.

How is this list ordered?

Free tools first, then freemium, then trial, then paid, and alphabetically inside each tier. Nobody pays to appear higher: Flocci AI Tools carries no ads, no sponsored slots and no paid listings, so the order reflects price and nothing else.

All 16 tools, free tiers first

Browse Notable Open Models →
Best Free Open-weight AI models: pricing tier, category and the capability each tool is listed for.
ToolPricingTypeListed for
DeepSeek ModelsFreeNotable Open ModelsOpen V3-series and R1 reasoning models
EXAONE (LG AI Research)FreeNotable Open ModelsEXAONE 4.5: LG's first open-weight vision-language model for industrial use cases
Falcon (TII)FreeNotable Open ModelsFalcon H1 hybrid transformer-Mamba architecture for efficient long-context inference
Gemma (Google)FreeNotable Open ModelsGoogle's lightweight open models (Gemma 4)
GPT-OSS (OpenAI)FreeNotable Open ModelsOpenAI's open-weight reasoning models
Hunyuan (Tencent)FreeNotable Open ModelsOpen-weight large text MoE models (Hunyuan A13B/Hy3 series) with permissive commercial license
IBM GraniteFreeNotable Open ModelsApache 2.0 licensed enterprise-grade model family
Llama (Meta)FreeNotable Open ModelsMeta's flagship open-weight family (Llama 4)
MiniMax M2 (open weights)FreeNotable Open ModelsOpen-weight MoE text/reasoning model line distinct from MiniMax's Hailuo video product already listed
Mistral Open Models (Magistral, Devstral, Voxtral)FreeNotable Open ModelsDevstral: open coding-agent model tuned for SWE-bench-style tasks
Nemotron (NVIDIA)FreeNotable Open ModelsNVIDIA's open post-trained/distilled model family built on Llama and NVIDIA's own architectures
OLMo (Ai2)FreeNotable Open ModelsOnly major model family shipping full pretraining data (Dolma), code and intermediate checkpoints, not just weights
Phi (Microsoft)FreeNotable Open ModelsMIT-licensed small language models optimized for on-device and edge deployment
PleiasFreeNotable Open ModelsFully open-weight, open-dataset small language models (350M-3B) explicitly built for EU AI Act compliance
Qwen (Alibaba)FreeNotable Open ModelsState-of-the-art open MoE models (Qwen3.x)
GLM (Z.ai)FreemiumNotable Open ModelsGLM-4.5-Flash and GLM-4.7-Flash text models are free via API

DeepSeek Models

Notable Open Models
free
  • Open V3-series and R1 reasoning models
  • Efficient MoE, low-cost inference
  • Strong math and code
  • Free open weights

EXAONE (LG AI Research)

Notable Open Models
free
  • EXAONE 4.5: LG's first open-weight vision-language model for industrial use cases
  • 33B flagship plus FP8/AWQ quantized variants for efficient local deployment
  • Backed by LG's enterprise/manufacturing domain tuning

Falcon (TII)

Notable Open Models
free
  • Falcon H1 hybrid transformer-Mamba architecture for efficient long-context inference
  • Falcon Mamba: pure state-space model variant, no attention layers
  • Free commercial use under TII's permissive open license

Gemma (Google)

Notable Open Models
free
  • 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
  • OpenAI's open-weight reasoning models
  • Run locally or self-host
  • Configurable reasoning effort
  • Free, permissive license

Hunyuan (Tencent)

Notable Open Models
free
  • Open-weight large text MoE models (Hunyuan A13B/Hy3 series) with permissive commercial license
  • Hunyuan3D line for fast image-to-3D generation (under 1 second)
  • Hy-MT translation models covering dozens of language pairs

IBM Granite

Notable Open Models
free
  • 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

Llama (Meta)

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

MiniMax M2 (open weights)

Notable Open Models
free
  • Open-weight MoE text/reasoning model line distinct from MiniMax's Hailuo video product already listed
  • Actively iterated through 2026 (M2.1, M2.5, M2.7 checkpoints)
  • Competitive on agentic coding and tool-use benchmarks among open Chinese models

Nemotron (NVIDIA)

Notable Open Models
free
  • NVIDIA's open post-trained/distilled model family built on Llama and NVIDIA's own architectures
  • Includes top-ranked open embedding models (Nemotron Embed, Llama-Embed-Nemotron)
  • OpenReasoning-Nemotron: distilled reasoning models for local/edge inference

OLMo (Ai2)

Notable Open Models
free
  • 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

Phi (Microsoft)

Notable Open Models
free
  • MIT-licensed small language models optimized for on-device and edge deployment
  • Phi-4-mini and Phi-4-multimodal handle text, vision and audio in one small model
  • Distributed via Azure AI Foundry, Hugging Face, and Ollama

Pleias

Notable Open Models
free
  • 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

Qwen (Alibaba)

Notable Open Models
free
  • State-of-the-art open MoE models (Qwen3.x)
  • Top-tier coding and multilingual skills
  • Runs on a single high-RAM Mac
  • Free open weights

GLM (Z.ai)

Notable Open Models
freemium
  • GLM-4.5-Flash and GLM-4.7-Flash text models are free via API
  • Open-weight GLM checkpoints on Hugging Face (MIT-style license for GLM-4.5-Air)
  • Strong agentic/coding benchmark results rivaling DeepSeek and Qwen

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