The Best Chinese AI App In 2026: The Ranked List, Then The Bench Scores Behind Each One

The best Chinese AI app in 2026 is Qwen Chat from Alibaba, a free AI assistant you can use in English at chat.qwen.ai.

DeepSeek is my second pick for free everyday chat, and Kimi from Moonshot AI is my third for research, slides and long documents.

A Chinese AI app is simply a chat assistant built by a Chinese company, and the best ones now compete directly with ChatGPT and Claude.

They solve the same problem as any AI assistant, which is getting writing, research, coding and analysis done faster.

I'll give you the ranked list first, then how each app works and how to start, then the privacy catch, and finally the real benchmark scores for the models behind them.

The top three Chinese AI apps at a glance

• 🥇 Qwen Chat by Alibaba is the best overall, because it is free, it works in English and it runs the Qwen model family.
• 🥈 DeepSeek by DeepSeek is the best free everyday app, and its API is one of the cheapest in AI.
• 🥉 Kimi by Moonshot AI is the best for slides, deep research and long documents.

How I ranked the best Chinese AI apps

I ranked every app on four things.

The first is the quality of the model behind it, using real GoldieBench averages where the model has been tested.

The second is whether you can sign up and use it in English from outside China.

The third is price, including whether the free tier is genuinely useful.

The fourth is trust, which covers where your data goes.

The 10 best Chinese AI apps, ranked

How each Chinese AI app works and how to start

1. Qwen Chat

Qwen Chat is Alibaba's free assistant, and you start by opening chat.qwen.ai and creating an account.

You pick a Qwen model from the menu, type a real task, and it answers in English.

Alibaba also opened an English international edition of QwenWork, its workplace agent, in public beta on 26 August 2026, according to several tech news reports.

2. DeepSeek

DeepSeek is a free app for phones and the web, and you start by downloading it or opening the web version from deepseek.com.

DeepSeek released V4.1-Flash on 10 September 2026, with open weights under the MIT licence, image understanding and a context window of around one million tokens.

It also said it would send V4-Pro requests to V4.1-Flash from 14 September until a V4.1-Pro arrives.

3. Kimi

Kimi is Moonshot AI's assistant at kimi.com, and its website now runs the K3 model.

The web app includes Slides, Deep Research, Docs, Scheduled tasks and Plugins, so you can ask it for a finished deck or a sourced report.

4. Z.ai Chat

Z.ai is Zhipu's international chat at chat.z.ai, and the site says it is currently powered by GLM-5.3-Flash.

Inside China, the same company runs the Zhipu Qingyan app.

5. MiniMax Agent and Hailuo AI

MiniMax Agent is a general AI agent, and Hailuo AI is MiniMax's video app, which now runs the H3 video model.

I tested H3, and it turns one line of text into a 2K clip with the sound already inside it.

6. LongCat

LongCat is the free chat app from Meituan, and it runs LongCat-2.0, an open 1.6-trillion-parameter model.

7. MiMo Studio

MiMo Studio is Xiaomi's web app for its open-weight MiMo-V2.6 Pro and Flash models.

8. Yuanbao

Yuanbao is Tencent's assistant inside the WeChat world, and it runs Tencent's Hunyuan models alongside DeepSeek.

9. Doubao and Dola

Doubao is ByteDance's assistant for China, and third-party trackers rank it as the most-used AI app there.

Dola, which was previously called Cici, is ByteDance's separate overseas app, and reports say it is unavailable in some markets, including the United States.

10. Baidu's Wenxin Assistant

Baidu's assistant runs the ERNIE models, and Baidu released ERNIE 5.1 in May 2026.

The privacy catch with Chinese AI apps

I'm going to be straight with you about data.

DeepSeek's privacy policy says user data is stored on servers in China.

Italy's data protection authority limited DeepSeek's processing of Italian users' data in January 2025, and Australia banned it on government devices in February 2025.

That doesn't make these apps unusable, but it does mean you should keep client data, passwords and private files out of them.

The good news is that many of these models have open weights, so you can run them on your own machine where nothing leaves your computer.

That is exactly what the video at the top of this page shows with DeepSeek and Ollama.

Tips and limits before you pick one

The app and the model are not the same thing, and the model behind an app can change without notice.

The China-first apps, which are Yuanbao, Doubao and Baidu's assistant, are hard to use if you don't read Chinese.

Free tiers have limits, so test on real work before you rely on one.

Benchmarks are a guide, so always test the app on your own tasks.

How to get started with the best Chinese AI app in five minutes

Open chat.qwen.ai in your browser and create a free account.

Pick the largest Qwen model in the menu for hard questions, and a faster one for quick jobs.

Give it a real task, such as rewriting a sales page or summarising a long report, because "hello" tells you nothing.

Open DeepSeek or Kimi in another tab and send the exact same task.

Compare the three answers side by side and keep the app that did your job best.

Save the prompts that worked in a notes file, because that is how a chat app becomes a repeatable system.

Chinese AI apps compared with ChatGPT and Claude

The biggest difference is price, because most of these apps are free and their APIs cost a fraction of the American models.

The second difference is openness, because Alibaba, DeepSeek, Zhipu, Meituan and Xiaomi all publish open weights for at least some of their models.

That means you can take the same brain out of the app and run it yourself, which you can't do with ChatGPT or Claude.

The third difference is trust, because the companies are based in China and their data policies follow Chinese law.

The gap in quality is now small, and you'll see exactly how small in the scores below.

For most everyday jobs, a free Chinese AI app does the work just as well as a paid American one.

The model scores behind each Chinese AI app

Now for the part GoldieBench exists for.

None of these apps ships as a single model you can score, so GoldieBench scores the models behind them on the same one-shot build tasks.

The scores below are the live averages on 9 October 2026, and each name links to its full model page.

Qwen 3.8 was benched through Alibaba's Qoder platform, and it is the highest-scoring Chinese model with a full run.

For context, the top single model on the board is Claude Opus 5 at 8.27, so Qwen 3.8 sits very close to the best American model.

MiniMax M3 at 7.97 and Kimi K3 at 7.89 are both strong enough to be a main brain in an agent.

LongCat's 8.12 is impressive, but it comes from only four tasks, so I treat it as provisional until it has a full run.

DeepSeek is the honest gap in this table, because its V4 models are listed but currently unranked, and the new V4.1-Flash hasn't been scored.

That is why DeepSeek ranks second on access and price rather than on a bench number.

ByteDance's Doubao models and Baidu's ERNIE 5.1 are not on GoldieBench, so I can't give you scores for them.

If you want to run any of these privately, the local models board shows Qwable 5 27B Coder, a fine-tune built on a Qwen base, at 7.14 on your own machine.

You can also put any three models side by side on the compare page, and the methodology page explains exactly how every build is scored.

What I learned testing the models behind these apps

I've tested most of these models on camera, and a few results surprised me.

LongCat built all four of its 3D game prompts into playable worlds on the first try.

Hy3 started with broken builds, and it climbed to an 8.2 DOOM build once I gave it clearer instructions, which taught me that cheap models need better prompts.

MiMo-V2.6 Pro built a neon snake game from one sentence in 8 minutes and 28 seconds, but it also produced a weak build on another task.

Kimi K3 went into my Agent OS on its launch day, because it was already included in the Kimi coding plan I pay for.

Qwen 3.8 Max became a single profile chip in my Agent OS, and from there it built 47 games and simulations on the bench.

The pattern across all of them is that the model behind the app matters more than the app, and how you prompt it matters most of all.

That's why I'd always test two or three of these apps on your own work instead of trusting any single ranking, including mine.

Who each Chinese AI app is for

Pick Qwen Chat if you want one free app with the strongest Chinese model behind it.

Pick DeepSeek if you want free chat today and the cheapest API for building tools later.

Pick Kimi if your work is research, reports and slide decks.

Pick Hailuo if you make video.

Pick Yuanbao, Doubao or Baidu's assistant only if you read Chinese and live in that ecosystem.

Also On Our Network

• Agent Operatorshow to set up the top three Chinese AI apps
• AI Income Deskthe best Chinese AI app for business work
• AI Tool Verdictten Chinese AI apps scored in a full verdict
• agentos.guidewhich Chinese models plug into an Agent OS
• agentos.guideGLM vs Kimi vs Opus, tested on agentos.guide

Start with Qwen Chat, keep private data out, and check the live board whenever a new model lands, because that is how you keep picking the best Chinese AI app.