Personal · best for
Top picks for Chat Companion (2026)
General-purpose conversation. Ranked from 357 live models on the OpenRouter catalog, weighted for low cost, low latency, reasoning quality.
What this is
A capability-matched shortlist, not a benchmark-tested winner. Models are scored by the fit of their declared specs (structured output, reasoning, context, modality, price) against Chat Companion. Pair with benchmark sources like Artificial Analysis or LMSys Arena before you ship. Full methodology →
| # | 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 | Details → |
| 2 | Google: Gemma 4 31B (free)google/gemma-4-31b-it:free | 124 | Free | Free | 262,144 | Details → |
| 3 | Qwen: Qwen3.5-9Bqwen/qwen3.5-9b | 124 | $0.10 | $0.15 | 262,144 | Details → |
| 4 | Google: Gemma 4 26B A4B google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it | 123 | $0.06 | $0.33 | 262,144 | Details → |
| 5 | Google: Gemma 4 31Bgoogle/gemma-4-31b-it | 123 | $0.13 | $0.38 | 262,144 | Details → |
| 6 | ByteDance Seed: Seed-2.0-Minibytedance-seed/seed-2.0-mini | 123 | $0.10 | $0.40 | 262,144 | Details → |
| 7 | Qwen: Qwen3.5-Flashqwen/qwen3.5-flash-02-23 | 123 | $0.07 | $0.26 | 1,000,000 | Details → |
| 8 | ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6 Flashbytedance-seed/seed-1.6-flash | 123 | $0.07 | $0.30 | 262,144 | Details → |
| 9 | xAI: Grok 4.1 Fastx-ai/grok-4.1-fast | 123 | $0.20 | $0.50 | 2,000,000 | Details → |
| 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 | Details → |
| 11 | xAI: Grok 4 Fastx-ai/grok-4-fast | 123 | $0.20 | $0.50 | 2,000,000 | Details → |
| 12 | OpenAI: GPT-5 Nanoopenai/gpt-5-nano | 123 | $0.05 | $0.40 | 400,000 | Details → |
| 13 | Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Litegoogle/gemini-2.5-flash-lite | 123 | $0.10 | $0.40 | 1,048,576 | Details → |
| 14 | NVIDIA: Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3Bnvidia/nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b | 123 | $0.05 | $0.20 | 262,144 | Details → |
| 15 | Mistral: Mistral Small 4mistralai/mistral-small-2603 | 123 | $0.15 | $0.60 | 262,144 | Details → |
How we ranked these
For Chat Companion, we weight models on low cost, low latency, reasoning quality. Higher means better. Scores combine each model's public metadata (context length, modality support, tool calling, structured output, reasoning capability) with live pricing. See full methodology →
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