Hy4 preview vs Stability AI: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Hy4 preview and Stability 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.
Stability AI
Stability AI
Provider of multimodal generative models and production-ready media generation and editing tools for image, audio, video, 3D and language.
Key features
- Multimodal Model Library: Publishes and maintains a wide range of pretrained models for text-to-image, text-to-audio, image-to-3D, text-to-video and language tasks, enabling developers to select models for specific media modalities and quality/size tradeoffs.
- High-resolution Image Synthesis: Provides and supports state-of-the-art diffusion models (Stable Diffusion family, SDXL variants) that create high-fidelity images and are available with optimized weights for different GPU vendors.
- Language Models and Chat: Offers language model checkpoints and tuned conversational models (StableLM, Stable Beluga variants) for instruction following, chat and text generation tasks with community and research preview deployments.
- Audio and Video Generative Tools: Maintains generative audio and video model projects (e.g., stable-audio, image-to-video) for conditional audio generation and image-to-video conversion workflows.
- Hardware Optimizations: Supplies AMD- and NVIDIA-optimized model builds (TensorRT/AMDGPU variants) and guidance to run models efficiently on different accelerators for production deployments.
- Open-source Repositories & Licensing: Publishes code, model checkpoints and licensing terms on GitHub and Hugging Face to support research, fine-tuning and commercial integration where licenses permit.
- Developer Tooling & SDKs: Provides platform tooling, SDKs and community projects (such as StableStudio and developer docs) to accelerate integration, editing, and deployment of generative workflows in applications.
- Enterprise & Production Focus: Offers enterprise-ready products and services that emphasize production readiness, scalability, and compliance for creative and business teams.
- Multimodal model suite covering Text-to-Image, Image-to-Video, Text-to-Audio and Image-to-3D
- Open-source model repositories (e.g., Stable Diffusion, StableLM) hosted on GitHub and Hugging Face
- Web-based creative UI: StableStudio (open-source variant of DreamStudio) for image creation and editing
- Developer platform and documentation across GitHub org and model pages; developer-facing SDKs/docs in repositories
- GPU-optimized model builds (AMD-optimized builds and NVIDIA TensorRT-optimized models)
- Licensing options: CC BY-SA-4.0 for some base models (e.g., StableLM) and Stability AI license terms that may limit commercial use for some checkpoints
- Integrations and community tools: Gradio/UIs (A1111 WebUI, Fooocus), third-party package managers/UIs (Stability Matrix, ComfyUI)
- Language/tooling ecosystem: primary code in Python and Jupyter Notebooks, plus TypeScript, Go and web assets
Best for
- Marketing & Creative Content: Generate high-resolution campaign images, ad creatives, and concept art rapidly for marketing teams and creative agencies.
- Interactive Image Editing: Use model-based inpainting and edit tools to modify photos and assets for product shots, retouching, and iterative design workflows.
- Audio Generation & Enhancement: Produce conditioned audio clips, sound design elements or clean and codec-optimized audio streams for games, podcasts and multimedia.
- Video & Animation Prototyping: Convert image sequences to video or use image-to-video models to prototype animations, storyboards, and short-form visual content.
- 3D Asset Creation: Generate or convert 2D images into 3D-aware assets (image-to-3D workflows) to accelerate creation of game and AR/VR models and prototypes.
- Enterprise Integration & Research: Integrate pretrained models into product backends, fine-tune models for domain-specific tasks, or run research experiments using published checkpoints and tooling.
- Enterprise production image generation and editing pipelines
- Research and experimentation with open-source model checkpoints (non-commercial research)
- Integrating generative models into applications via GitHub-hosted repos and Hugging Face model endpoints
- Audio and video content generation for media production workflows
- 3D asset generation and research (Image-to-3D workflows)
- Prototyping developer tools, UIs and agent flows using provided SDKs and community UIs