Notable Open Modelsfree

Pleias

Fully open-weight, open-dataset small language models (350M-3B) explicitly built for EU AI Act compliance

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What Pleias does

  • 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

Pleias — straight answers

What is Pleias?

Pleias is listed under Notable Open Models, in the AI Models & Local Execution category on Flocci AI Tools. Fully open-weight, open-dataset small language models (350M-3B) explicitly built for EU AI Act compliance. It is free, with no paid plan attached, and it lives at pleias.fr.

Is Pleias free?

Pleias is listed as fully free — there is no paid tier attached to it in the catalog. That makes it one of the 396 entries on Flocci AI Tools with no upgrade path built in.

Can I use Pleias in a browser, or is there an app?

Pleias needs to be installed or self-hosted — it doesn't run in a browser tab. It is available on self-hosting, the web and an API.

What can Pleias do?

Pleias does 3 things the catalog singles out: 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.

What is the best free alternative to Pleias?

DeepSeek Models is the closest free alternative: it sits in the same Notable Open Models sub-category and is free. ERNIE 4.5 Open Models (Baidu), Falcon (TII) and Hunyuan (Tencent) also start free. The full list is on the alternatives page.

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Pleias alternatives

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Llama (Meta)

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

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  • 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
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DeepSeek Models

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  • 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
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Gemma (Google)

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

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  • 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
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  • 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
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Head-to-head comparisons

Pleias vs Llama (Meta)Pleias vs Qwen (Alibaba)Pleias vs DeepSeek ModelsPleias vs Gemma (Google)Pleias vs GPT-OSS (OpenAI)Pleias vs Mistral Open Models (Magistral, Devstral, Voxtral)