Hy4 preview vs Leonardo AI: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Hy4 preview and Leonardo AI — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
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.
Leonardo AI
Leonardo-Interactive
Web-based image and video generation platform for creating and editing visuals from text prompts, with SDKs and plugins for integration.
Key features
- Text-to-Image Generation: Produces high-quality images from concise textual prompts with selectable artistic styles and presets to control aesthetics and output type.
- Background Removal: One-click or automated subject isolation tools (including a background-removal-js project) to quickly extract subjects and speed up compositing workflows.
- SDKs and REST API: Official TypeScript and Python SDKs plus OpenAPI/REST endpoints enable programmatic image generation, management, and integration into external applications and pipelines.
- Editor Plugins: Native integrations and community plugins (e.g., Blender texturing plugin, Krita plugin) allow artists to generate and apply assets directly inside popular creative tools.
- Asset Management and Editing: In-browser/image workspace features for editing, upscaling, and iterating on generated images to refine outputs without external software.
- Video Generation: Capabilities to create dynamic visuals and short immersive video content from prompts and style selections for motion assets and concept reels.
- Prompt-driven image generation across multiple artistic styles
- Video generation capabilities (prompt to immersive video)
- Image manipulation tools including one-click background removal
- Official REST API with OpenAPI specification for programmatic access
- Official SDKs: TypeScript (leonardo-ts-sdk) and Python (leonardo-python-sdk)
- Support for synchronous and asynchronous SDK usage (HTTPX / requests / aiohttp variants)
- Official plugins and integrations (e.g., Blender texturing plugin, browser background-removal JS)
- Community-driven integrations and SDKs (Krita plugin, Ruby gem, Go/C# clients and CLIs)
Best for
- Concept Art & Illustration: Rapidly produce multiple styled concept images from prompts to iterate on character, environment, and product ideas during pre-production.
- Game and 3D Texturing: Generate textures and material references via the Blender texturing plugin to accelerate asset creation and integrate directly into 3D workflows.
- E-commerce Imagery: Create product visuals and perform one-click background removal for clean product shots and quick catalog preparation.
- Integrated App Generation: Embed image-generation features into apps or services using the TypeScript or Python SDKs and REST/OpenAPI endpoints for automated content creation.
- Digital Painting Workflow: Use the Krita plugin to generate reference images or elements inside a painting application, streamlining artist workflows and compositing.
- Marketing and Creative Production: Produce styled visuals and short videos for social posts, ads, or campaign mockups to cut production time and costs.
- Concept art and illustration generation from text prompts
- Automated product or marketing image creation and background removal
- Texture generation and workflow integration for 3D artists (Blender plugin)
- Batch or programmatic generation using SDKs and REST API in pipelines
- Rapid prototyping of visuals for games, ads, and social media
- Integrating Leonardo image tools into creative apps (Krita, custom tooling)