The best free AI models right now, by category

"Free" means two things here: models with open weights, which you can download and run yourself, and models with a free API you can call today. Paid-only models are left out. Every score comes from Arena, where people compare two anonymous answers and vote for the better one.

These numbers update every night. Data as of 18 Oct 2026.

Chat

Best free model: mimo-v2.6-pro (score 1491, #11 of 416).

226 of the 416 chat models on Arena are free to use. The top free models are now close to the best paid ones: the gap is usually a few dozen points, and in a blind test most people cannot tell them apart on everyday questions.

Coding (web development)

Best free model: Kimi K3 (Max) (score 1655, #14 of 144).

Arena's web development arena asks models to build working pages from a prompt. 57 of 144 models there are free.

Vision

Best free model: glm-5.3-flash (score 1296, #23 of 165).

Images

Best free model: qwen-image-2.1 (score 1223, #19 of 82).

Video

Best free model: minimax-h3 (score 1460, #8 of 48).

Image editing

Best free model: qwen-image-2.1 (score 1369, #18 of 59).

What "best" does not tell you

The best free chat model is often a very large model. Large models are free to download, but you need a lot of GPU memory to run them. If you want the best model for your computer, use the Run at home simulator: pick your graphics card and it shows the highest-voted model that fits, with an estimated speed.

If you want to try them without installing anything, the comparison page sends one prompt to two free models at once, on your own free OpenRouter account.