Best of
Open weights at the frontier.
The open-weight models that stand next to closed flagships on the live rankings, hosted or on your own hardware.
Last reviewed July 16, 2026
The gap between open and closed models keeps narrowing: today's open-weight flagships sit on the same leaderboards as closed ones, and several picks below lead their lanes outright. Open weights buy you provider choice, local deployment, and price competition; here is where that trade is strongest.
The picks
$0.43 in / $0.87 out per M tokens · 1.0M context
Frontier-lane benchmark standing with published weights; the strongest argument that open has caught up.
Best for: Frontier-grade work with open-weight requirements.
$1.25 in / $3.75 out per M tokens · 1M context
One family covering flagship, coder, reasoner, and small sizes, so one vocabulary of behavior scales from a laptop to a cluster.
Best for: Teams standardizing on one open family.
$0.5 in / $2.20 out per M tokens · 262K context
A very large open MoE tuned for reasoning, competitive on the hard lanes and fully open.
Best for: Hard reasoning with open weights.
$1.40 in / $4.40 out per M tokens · 262K context
Strong across reasoning and coding lanes with first-class Chinese-English performance, openly released.
Best for: Bilingual products and mixed workloads.
$0.12 in / $0.35 out per M tokens · 262K context
Google's open line at a size a workstation GPU can serve; the reference point for capable local inference.
Best for: Local-first setups and private data.
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