Grok 4.1 vs Hy4 preview: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)

A side-by-side comparison of Grok 4.1 and Hy4 preview — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.

Grok 4.1

xAI

Freemium

A conversational frontier model by xAI offering improved emotional intelligence, real-time search, image generation, and creative reasoning.

Emotional Intelligence: Enhanced empathy and interpersonal skills for more emotionally aware and context-sensitive responses, validated by a high EQ-Bench score.
Multi‑Platform Availability: Accessible on grok.com, X, and native iOS and Android apps, enabling consistent conversational experiences across devices.
Auto Mode Deployment: Rolling out with an Auto mode that adapts model behavior for general use, simplifying user interaction without manual mode switching.
Real‑Time Search Integration: Incorporates live search and trend analysis to provide up-to-date answers and context-aware summaries tied to current events.
Image Generation: Built-in capability to generate images from prompts, enabling creative visual outputs alongside text-based conversation.
Creative Task Improvement: Improved handling of creative tasks (writing, brainstorming, ideation) with stronger narrative and stylistic control.
Real‑World Reasoning: Better commonsense and situational reasoning for practical, grounded answers in everyday and professional contexts.
Advanced conversational intelligence optimized for natural, context-aware dialogue
Improved emotional understanding and interpersonal skills (high EQ-Bench score: 1586)
Real-time search integration for current information and trend analysis
Image generation capabilities
Available across web (grok.com), X, iOS, and Android
Auto mode rollout for managed behavior/configuration
Optimized for creative tasks and improved handling of creative prompts

Content Creation: Generate creative copy, story drafts, social posts, and companion images with improved creative reasoning and stylistic control.
Social Media Trend Analysis: Monitor and summarize real-time X trends and provide actionable insights for social teams and marketers.
Customer & Community Engagement: Serve as an empathetic conversational assistant for user interactions on X and web/mobile apps, improving tone and rapport.
Research and Fact Summarization: Use integrated real-time search to compile up-to-date summaries and syntheses of current events and topical information.
Visual Asset Generation: Produce on-demand images for marketing, concept exploration, or illustrative content directly from conversational prompts.
Interactive conversational assistant for general-purpose Q&A and dialogue
Creative content generation including text and images
Customer-facing chat and empathetic support interactions
Real-time trend monitoring and analysis
Personal coaching or interpersonal skill simulations leveraging emotional intelligence

Tencent

Free

Tencent's open-weight Hy4 preview, a 770B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with 49B active parameters and a 1M-token context window.

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.

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.