Hy4 preview vs Microsoft Designer: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Hy4 preview and Microsoft Designer — 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.
Microsoft Designer
Microsoft
A Microsoft graphic design app that uses AI to create social posts, invitations, postcards, and custom visuals quickly.
Key features
- AI-Powered Design Suggestions: Dynamically recommends layouts, color schemes, and typography as users add content, accelerating iteration and producing cohesive visual options.
- Text-to-Image Generation: Generates unique images from textual prompts (via integrated image-generation models) so users can create custom visuals without external stock or photography.
- Template Library: Provides a wide collection of ready-made, customizable templates for social posts, invitations, postcards, banners, and more, sized for popular platforms.
- Image Editing Tools: Built-in tools for cropping, background removal, filters, and color adjustments to refine photos and graphics without leaving the app.
- Brand and Asset Integration: Lets users import or set brand colors, fonts, and logos and apply them across designs to maintain consistent branding.
- Export and Sharing Options: Exports assets in common formats (PNG, JPEG, PDF), offers preset sizes for social platforms, and supports sharing or downloading of finished creatives.
- Web-based graphic design editor for social posts, invitations, postcards, and general graphics
- AI-driven design recommendations and automatic layout/spacing improvements
- Template library and starter layouts for quick creation
- Prompt-driven image generation via the Designer UI (users enter prompts to generate visuals)
- Integration as an AI-powered formatting/layout assistant for Word and PowerPoint (Microsoft 365)
- Exports and assets suitable for social media and print
- Requires Microsoft account sign-in for use
Best for
- Rapid Social Media Content Creation: Produce Instagram, Facebook, and X posts sized and styled for each platform using templates and AI layout suggestions.
- Event Invitations and Digital Postcards: Design custom invites and digital postcards with generated imagery and editable templates for quick distribution.
- Marketing Creative Production: Marketing teams generate multiple ad or campaign variations quickly, using AI generation to create unique visuals and iterate layouts.
- Small Business Branding: Small businesses create branded promotional graphics and assets without hiring a designer by applying saved brand colors and logos.
- Concept Visualization for Designers: Generate concept images and mockups from prompts to explore creative directions before detailed design work.
- Presentation Asset Creation: Produce visual assets (custom images, cover graphics, thumbnails) to enhance Word and PowerPoint presentations.
- Create social media posts and marketing creatives quickly using templates and AI suggestions
- Design digital invitations, postcards, and promotional graphics
- Automatically improve document and presentation layouts inside Word and PowerPoint
- Generate imagery from text prompts for use in marketing and content
- Rapid prototyping of visual assets for small teams and individual creators