Model rankings updated June 2026 based on real usage data.
At OpenRouter, we believe that free models play a crucial role in democratizing access to AI. These models allow hundreds of thousands of users worldwide to experiment, learn, and innovate. Below you will find the top free AI models currently available on OpenRouter.
We are continuing to actively expand our free model capacity by onboarding new providers and directly covering costs to help promote freely accessible models. While we can't guarantee what the future holds, we will continue to support free inference options on our platform.
For the simplest way to get started, try openrouter/free, a router that automatically selects from available free models based on your request's requirements.
Owl Alpha is a high-performance foundation model designed for agentic workloads. Natively supports tool use, and long-context tasks, with strong performance in code generation, automated workflows, and complex instruction execution. Compatible with Claude Code, OpenClaw, and other mainstream productivity tools.
Note: Prompts and completions may be logged by the provider and used to improve the model.
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra is an open frontier-reasoning and orchestration model from NVIDIA, with 55B active parameters out of 550B total (MoE). Built on a hybrid Transformer-Mamba mixture-of-experts architecture, it supports text input and output with a context window of up to 1M tokens. It is suited for long-running agentic workflows, including agent orchestration, coding agents, deep research, and complex enterprise tasks.
It is particularly strong at multi-step reasoning and planning, with high-throughput inference designed for high-volume agent pipelines. It is part of the NVIDIA Nemotron family of open models for agentic AI.
Nex-N2-Pro is an agentic mixture-of-experts model from Nex AGI, with 17B active parameters out of 397B total. Built on the Qwen3.5 architecture, it accepts text and image input and produces text output, and supports reasoning, function calling, and structured outputs. It is designed for coding, tool use, deep research, and long-horizon agentic workflows, unifying planning, code implementation, debugging, and iteration into a single execution loop.
Laguna M.1 is the flagship coding agent model from Poolside, optimized for complex software engineering tasks. Designed for agentic coding workflows, it supports tool calling and reasoning, with a 128K context window and up to 8K output tokens. Quantized to fp8 for efficient inference. By using this model, you agree to Poolside’s End User License Agreement
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super is a 120B-parameter open hybrid MoE model, activating just 12B parameters for maximum compute efficiency and accuracy in complex multi-agent applications. Built on a hybrid Mamba-Transformer Mixture-of-Experts architecture with multi-token prediction (MTP), it delivers over 50% higher token generation compared to leading open models.
The model features a 1M token context window for long-term agent coherence, cross-document reasoning, and multi-step task planning. Latent MoE enables calling 4 experts for the inference cost of only one, improving intelligence and generalization. Multi-environment RL training across 10+ environments delivers leading accuracy on benchmarks including AIME 2025, TerminalBench, and SWE-Bench Verified.
Fully open with weights, datasets, and recipes under the NVIDIA Open License, Nemotron 3 Super allows easy customization and secure deployment anywhere — from workstation to cloud.
gpt-oss-120b is an open-weight, 117B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model from OpenAI designed for high-reasoning, agentic, and general-purpose production use cases. It activates 5.1B parameters per forward pass and is optimized to run on a single H100 GPU with native MXFP4 quantization. The model supports configurable reasoning depth, full chain-of-thought access, and native tool use, including function calling, browsing, and structured output generation.
Laguna XS.2 is the second-generation model in the XS size class from Poolside, their efficient coding agent series. It combines tool calling and reasoning capabilities with a compact footprint, offering a 256K context window and up to 32K output tokens. Quantized to FP8 for fast, cost-efficient agentic coding workflows.
Laguna XS.2 is designed for software engineering and agentic coding use cases, and you are responsible for confirming that it is appropriate for your intended application. Laguna XS.2 is subject to the Apache 2.0 License, and should be used consistently with Poolside's Acceptable Use Policy. We advise against circumventing Laguna XS.2 safety guardrails without implementing substantially equivalent mitigations appropriate for your use case.
Please report security vulnerabilities or safety concerns to [email protected].
gpt-oss-20b is an open-weight 21B parameter model released by OpenAI under the Apache 2.0 license. It uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with 3.6B active parameters per forward pass, optimized for lower-latency inference and deployability on consumer or single-GPU hardware. The model is trained in OpenAI’s Harmony response format and supports reasoning level configuration, fine-tuning, and agentic capabilities including function calling, tool use, and structured outputs.
Gemma 4 31B Instruct is Google DeepMind's 30.7B dense multimodal model supporting text and image input with text output. Features a 256K token context window, configurable thinking/reasoning mode, native function calling, and multilingual support across 140+ languages. Strong on coding, reasoning, and document understanding tasks. Apache 2.0 license.
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B is a small language MoE model with highest compute efficiency and accuracy for developers to build specialized agentic AI systems.
The model is fully open with open-weights, datasets and recipes so developers can easily customize, optimize, and deploy the model on their infrastructure for maximum privacy and security.
NVIDIA Nemotron™ 3 Nano Omni is a 30B-A3B open multimodal model designed to function as a perception and context sub-agent in enterprise agent systems. It accepts text, image, video, and audio inputs and produces text output, enabling agents to perceive and reason across modalities in a single inference loop.
Built on a hybrid MoE Transformer-Mamba architecture with Conv3D video layers and Efficient Video Sampling (EVS), it delivers approximately 2× higher throughput and 2.5× lower compute for video reasoning versus separate vision + speech pipelines. It supports up to 300K context length and a 16,384 reasoning budget, with extended thinking enabled via reasoning.enabled on OpenRouter.
NVIDIA-Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2 is a large language model (LLM) trained from scratch by NVIDIA, and designed as a unified model for both reasoning and non-reasoning tasks. It responds to user queries and tasks by first generating a reasoning trace and then concluding with a final response.
The model's reasoning capabilities can be controlled via a system prompt. If the user prefers the model to provide its final answer without intermediate reasoning traces, it can be configured to do so.
NVIDIA Nemotron Nano 2 VL is a 12-billion-parameter open multimodal reasoning model designed for video understanding and document intelligence. It introduces a hybrid Transformer-Mamba architecture, combining transformer-level accuracy with Mamba’s memory-efficient sequence modeling for significantly higher throughput and lower latency.
The model supports inputs of text and multi-image documents, producing natural-language outputs. It is trained on high-quality NVIDIA-curated synthetic datasets optimized for optical-character recognition, chart reasoning, and multimodal comprehension.
Nemotron Nano 2 VL achieves leading results on OCRBench v2 and scores ≈ 74 average across MMMU, MathVista, AI2D, OCRBench, OCR-Reasoning, ChartQA, DocVQA, and Video-MME—surpassing prior open VL baselines. With Efficient Video Sampling (EVS), it handles long-form videos while reducing inference cost.
Open-weights, training data, and fine-tuning recipes are released under a permissive NVIDIA open license, with deployment supported across NeMo, NIM, and major inference runtimes.
The Llama Nemotron Embed VL 1B V2 embedding model is optimized for multimodal question-answering retrieval. The model can embed 'documents' in the form of image, text, or image and text combined. Documents can be retrieved given a user query in text form. The model supports images containing text, tables, charts, and infographics.
Gemma 4 26B A4B IT is an instruction-tuned Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model from Google DeepMind. Despite 25.2B total parameters, only 3.8B activate per token during inference — delivering near-31B quality at a fraction of the compute cost. Supports multimodal input including text, images, and video (up to 60s at 1fps). Features a 256K token context window, native function calling, configurable thinking/reasoning mode, and structured output support. Released under Apache 2.0.
Seedream 4.5 is the latest in-house image generation model developed by ByteDance. Compared with Seedream 4.0, it delivers comprehensive improvements, especially in editing consistency, including better preservation of subject details, lighting, and color tone. It also enhances portrait refinement and small-text rendering. The model’s multi-image composition capabilities have been significantly strengthened, and both reasoning performance and visual aesthetics continue to advance, enabling more accurate and artistically expressive image generation.
Pricing is $0.04 per output image, regardless of size.