Llama 4 (Meta) vs Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3)
Which one should you pick? Here's the full breakdown.
Llama 4 (Meta)
Meta's open-weights flagship family -- Scout (10M context), Maverick (multimodal 400B MoE), Behemoth in preview
Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3)
Tencent's Hy3 Preview launched 2026-04-23 -- 295B total / 21B active MoE, 256K context, open-sourced on HuggingFace under tencent/Hy3-preview. Cheapest frontier-class API at ~1.2 RMB per million input tokens. Integrated into Yuanbao, WeChat, QQ
| Category | Llama 4 (Meta) | Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3) |
|---|---|---|
| Ease of Use | 5.0 | 7.0 |
| Output Quality | 8.5 | 8.0 |
| Value | 9.0 | 9.5 |
| Features | 9.0 | 8.0 |
| Overall | 7.9 | 8.1 |
Personality & Tone
Llama 4 (Meta): The open-weight workhorse
Tone: Plain, helpful, and neutral. Meta's instruction-tuned Llama 4 reads like a sanitized ChatGPT -- useful for general tasks but without a strong persona of its own.
Quirks: The 'real' personality depends on the checkpoint you run. Base Llama 4 is bland by design; the interesting behaviors come from community fine-tunes (Nous, Hermes, Dolphin, etc.) that give it different voices and refusal patterns.
Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3): Tencent's first serious open-weights LLM
Tone: Direct and structured, similar to DeepSeek's chat tone -- compact answers in technical domains, reasonable Chinese-language polish, English noticeably less expressive than Claude or GPT.
Quirks: PRC content filters apply across the same set of regulated topics as DeepSeek and Qwen. Distribution via Yuanbao + WeChat + QQ means many Hy3 users in the wild are talking to it through chat-app surfaces rather than a developer console.
Pricing Comparison
| Feature | Llama 4 (Meta) | Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3) |
|---|---|---|
| Free Tier | Yes | Yes |
| Starting Price | $0 | $0 |
Benchmark Head-to-Head
Llama 4 Maverick (17B/400B MoE) benchmarks — Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3) has no published benchmarks
| Benchmark | Description | Score |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU-Pro | Harder multi-subject reasoning | 80.5% |
| GPQA Diamond | Graduate-level science questions | 69.8% |
| HumanEval | Python code generation | 88% |
| MMMU (multimodal) | 73.4% |
Which Should You Pick?
Pick Llama 4 (Meta) if...
- ✓More features (9 vs 8)
Developers and teams who need a permissively-licensed open-weights model with strong tooling, long context (Scout), or multimodal (Maverick). Safe default choice given the ecosystem.
Visit Llama 4 (Meta)Pick Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3) if...
- ✓Easier to use (7 vs 5)
Chinese-market builders, multilingual products that need strong CN performance, and cost-sensitive developers who want frontier-class quality at sub-DeepSeek pricing. Also anyone watching the open-weights field who wants Tencent's distribution-backed entry on the bench.
Visit Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3)Our Verdict
Llama 4 (Meta) and Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3) are extremely close overall. Your choice comes down to specific needs -- Llama 4 (Meta) is better for developers and teams who need a permissively-licensed open-weights model with strong tooling, long context (scout), or multimodal (maverick), while Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3) works best for chinese-market builders, multilingual products that need strong cn performance, and cost-sensitive developers who want frontier-class quality at sub-deepseek pricing.