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Best AI model for Chat Companion (2026)
General-purpose conversation. Ranked from 343 live models on the OpenRouter catalog, weighted for low cost, low latency, reasoning quality.
| # | Model | Score | In / 1M | Out / 1M | Context | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Google: Gemma 4 26B A4B (free)google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it:free | 124 | Free | Free | 262,144 | Try → |
| 2 | Google: Gemma 4 31B (free)google/gemma-4-31b-it:free | 124 | Free | Free | 262,144 | Try → |
| 3 | Qwen: Qwen3.5-9Bqwen/qwen3.5-9b | 124 | $0.10 | $0.15 | 262,144 | Try → |
| 4 | Google: Gemma 4 26B A4B google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it | 123 | $0.07 | $0.35 | 262,144 | Try → |
| 5 | Google: Gemma 4 31Bgoogle/gemma-4-31b-it | 123 | $0.13 | $0.38 | 262,144 | Try → |
| 6 | ByteDance Seed: Seed-2.0-Minibytedance-seed/seed-2.0-mini | 123 | $0.10 | $0.40 | 262,144 | Try → |
| 7 | Qwen: Qwen3.5-Flashqwen/qwen3.5-flash-02-23 | 123 | $0.07 | $0.26 | 1,000,000 | Try → |
| 8 | ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6 Flashbytedance-seed/seed-1.6-flash | 123 | $0.07 | $0.30 | 262,144 | Try → |
| 9 | xAI: Grok 4.1 Fastx-ai/grok-4.1-fast | 123 | $0.20 | $0.50 | 2,000,000 | Try → |
| 10 | Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite Preview 09-2025google/gemini-2.5-flash-lite-preview-09-2025 | 123 | $0.10 | $0.40 | 1,048,576 | Try → |
| 11 | xAI: Grok 4 Fastx-ai/grok-4-fast | 123 | $0.20 | $0.50 | 2,000,000 | Try → |
| 12 | OpenAI: GPT-5 Nanoopenai/gpt-5-nano | 123 | $0.05 | $0.40 | 400,000 | Try → |
| 13 | Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Litegoogle/gemini-2.5-flash-lite | 123 | $0.10 | $0.40 | 1,048,576 | Try → |
| 14 | NVIDIA: Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3Bnvidia/nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b | 123 | $0.05 | $0.20 | 262,144 | Try → |
| 15 | Mistral: Mistral Small 4mistralai/mistral-small-2603 | 123 | $0.15 | $0.60 | 262,144 | Try → |
How we ranked these
For Chat Companion, we weight models on low cost, low latency, reasoning quality. Higher means better. Scores combine OpenRouter's model metadata (context length, modality support, tool calling, structured output, reasoning capability) with public pricing. See full methodology →
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