Open Models

Granite alternatives

Explore 8 options alongside Granite (IBM), a product in Open Models.

Candidates share an existing guide group, a comparison, or specific tags within the same category. This shortlist is not a ranking or a test result.

Command R

Listed together in guide “Open-source AI models”

Cohere's open-weight LLM family optimized for retrieval-augmented generation and tool use; succeeded by Command A as Cohere's flagship.

Open (open weights/source) CC-BY-NC-4.0

Use cases

  • Enterprise RAG assistants grounded in company documents
  • Building agents that call external tools and APIs
  • Research on open-weight instruction-tuned models

Pricing: Model weights are free for non-commercial research under a CC-BY-NC license; commercial access is via Cohere's usage-priced API and enterprise deployments.

Pricing ↗ · Documentation ↗ · Sources

This record was last reviewed on 2026-10-09.

DBRX

Listed together in guide “Open-source AI models”

Open-weight mixture-of-experts LLM released by Databricks in 2024; retired from Databricks serving in 2025, though the weights remain available.

Open (open weights/source) Databricks Open Model License

Use cases

  • Research on mixture-of-experts model architectures
  • Self-hosted LLM deployments on enterprise infrastructure
  • Fine-tuning experiments on a large open base model

Pricing: DBRX weights are free to download under the Databricks Open Model License; running the model requires the user's own infrastructure, and Databricks no longer serves it as a hosted model.

Sources

This record was last reviewed on 2026-09-10.

Falcon

Listed together in guide “Open-source AI models”

Family of open-weight large language models developed by the Technology Innovation Institute (TII).

Open (open weights/source) TII Falcon License

Use cases

  • Self-hosted chatbots and text generation
  • Research on large-scale open models
  • Fine-tuning for domain-specific applications

Pricing: Falcon models are free to download and use commercially under permissive TII licenses; costs come only from the compute used to run them.

Sources

This record was last reviewed on 2026-09-10.

Jamba

Listed together in guide “Open-source AI models”

Open model family from AI21 Labs that combines Transformer and state-space (Mamba) architectures.

Open (open weights/source) Jamba Open Model License

Use cases

  • Long-document analysis and summarization
  • Enterprise RAG over large corpora
  • Research on hybrid state-space architectures

Pricing: Jamba weights are downloadable under the Jamba Open Model License; managed access through AI21's platform and cloud marketplaces is billed per token.

Sources

This record was last reviewed on 2026-09-10.

Nemotron

Listed together in guide “Open-source AI models”

Family of open language models released by NVIDIA for enterprise and research use.

Open (open weights/source) NVIDIA Open Model License

Use cases

  • Building agentic AI on open, commercially usable models
  • Enterprise deployments on NVIDIA infrastructure
  • Research using open post-training datasets

Pricing: Nemotron weights are free under NVIDIA's open model license; production deployment via NVIDIA NIM/AI Enterprise is licensed commercially.

Sources

This record was last reviewed on 2026-10-10.

Aleph Alpha

Related: shares the task Running models yourself

German AI company that builds sovereign large language models and enterprise AI platforms for industry, public-sector, and defense customers.

Paid

Use cases

  • Public-sector and defense applications that require data to stay in Europe
  • Enterprise assistants in industry, administration, and science
  • Research collaborations on transparent language models

Pricing: Aleph Alpha sells to organizations rather than consumers and does not publish list prices; commercial terms are arranged directly with enterprise and public-sector customers.

Documentation ↗ · Sources

This record was last reviewed on 2026-09-10.

Baichuan

Related: shares the task Running models yourself

Open-weight bilingual LLM family from Beijing-based Baichuan Intelligence, now focused on medical AI with its Baichuan-M reasoning models.

Open (open weights/source) Baichuan Community License

Use cases

  • Building Chinese-language NLP applications on open weights
  • Research on bilingual large language models
  • Medical AI assistants based on the Baichuan-M series

Pricing: Open-weight Baichuan models are free to download for research, with licensing terms for commercial use; hosted APIs are billed by usage.

Sources

This record was last reviewed on 2026-09-10.

DeepSeek

Related: shares the task Running models yourself

Open-weight LLM family and chat assistant from Hangzhou-based DeepSeek, known for strong reasoning models.

Open (open weights/source) MIT (DeepSeek-V3 repository code); DeepSeek Model License (DeepSeek-V3 Base and Chat weights)

Use cases

  • Math, coding, and analytical tasks that need explicit reasoning
  • Self-hosting open-weight models for privacy or cost control
  • Cost-sensitive API integrations

Pricing: The chat assistant is free; the developer API is usage-priced, and open-weight models can be self-hosted without license fees.

Pricing ↗ · Sources

This record was last reviewed on 2026-10-13.

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