Google Whisk vs Hy4 preview: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Google Whisk and Hy4 preview — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
Google Whisk
Experimental web tool that uses images as prompts to visualize ideas and craft visual stories.
Key features
- Image-as-Prompt Input: Accepts user-provided images as the primary input to seed visualizations and guide output generation, enabling idea exploration from existing visuals.
- Visual Storytelling Focus: Provides tools and workflows geared toward arranging and refining visual elements into a coherent narrative or presentation to communicate ideas.
- Rapid Prototyping Experience: Positioned as a Labs experiment, Whisk emphasizes quick iteration and exploratory workflows that let users test concepts without heavy setup.
- Web-Based Accessibility: Delivered as a browser-accessible Labs tool so users can try image-prompt workflows without installing software or configuring environments.
- Refinement & Iteration: Supports iterative editing of prompts and visual outputs so creators can progressively refine visuals and story structure (experimental capabilities may vary).
- Use images as prompts to drive visual outputs
- Visualize ideas and concepts from image-based inputs
- Support for narrative/storytelling workflows using images
- Web-based UI hosted under Google Labs (labs.google/fx)
- Experimental preview — intended for exploration and feedback
Best for
- Concept Visualization: Turn a photo, sketch, or mood image into a set of visual explorations to communicate product, design, or branding concepts during early-stage ideation.
- Storyboarding & Narratives: Use images as seeds to assemble visual storyboards or sequences that illustrate a narrative arc for presentations, pitches, or creative projects.
- Marketing & Content Creation: Rapidly prototype visual assets and scene ideas from reference images to inform campaign creatives or social media content planning.
- Creative Prototyping: Experiment with different visual directions by iterating on image prompts and generated outputs to evaluate style, composition, and mood.
- Educational Visual Aids: Create illustrative visual sequences or concept visuals from real-world images to support lectures, lessons, or explanatory content.
- Rapidly prototype visual concepts from reference images
- Create narrative or storyboards guided by image prompts
- Generate visual assets for presentations or social media
- Explore multimodal creative workflows and ideation
Hy4 preview
Tencent
Tencent's open-weight Hy4 preview, a 770B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with 49B active parameters and a 1M-token context window.
Key features
- 770B Mixture-of-Experts Architecture: Holds 770 billion total parameters while activating only 49 billion per token, so capacity scales without proportional inference cost.
- 1M-Token Context Window: Accepts inputs exceeding one million tokens, allowing whole codebases, long document sets or extended agent traces in a single prompt.
- Apache 2.0 Open Weights: Released under a permissive licence that allows commercial use, modification and redistribution with no separate agreement.
- Productivity Task Focus: Tuned for real-world coding, office work and scientific research rather than narrow benchmark optimisation.
- Multi-Product Availability: Accessible globally through Tencent's WorkBuddy, CodeBuddy, Yuanbao and ima applications in addition to the raw weights.
- API Access via TokenHub and OpenRouter: Can be called through Tencent Cloud TokenHub or OpenRouter for teams that prefer hosted inference over self-hosting.
Best for
- Whole-Repository Code Work: Load an entire codebase into the million-token context to reason about refactors and cross-file dependencies at once.
- Long-Horizon Agent Tasks: Drive multi-step agent workflows where the full history of tool calls and intermediate results must stay in context.
- Self-Hosted Deployment: Run a frontier-scale open-weight model on private infrastructure where data cannot leave the organisation.
- Scientific Literature Analysis: Ingest large collections of papers or experimental logs and synthesise findings without chunking the input.
- Office Document Processing: Summarise, draft and restructure long reports, contracts and spreadsheets in enterprise workflows.
- Commercial Fine-Tuning: Adapt the weights for a proprietary product under the Apache 2.0 licence without negotiating a model licence.