ERNIE
ERNIE (Wenxin) is Baidu's foundation-model family, currently led by ERNIE 5.1, which Baidu says was trained for about 6% of the pre-training cost of comparable models and ranked first among Chinese models on LMArena's Search Arena in May 2026. Developers reach it through Baidu's Qianfan platform, which serves ERNIE alongside DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM and Qwen behind one OpenAI-compatible API.
Pros
- Flagship intelligence at second-tier prices: ERNIE 5.1 lists at CN¥4 per million input tokens and CN¥18 per million output for prompts up to 32k (roughly $0.56 and $2.54), while the workhorse ERNIE 4.5 Turbo runs CN¥0.8/M input and CN¥3.2/M output with cache hits at CN¥0.2/M and batch inference at 40% of list. Baidu also publishes open-weight ERNIE 4.5 variants on Hugging Face — 21B-A3B, 28B-A3B-VL and the 424B-A47B multimodal base — so the family can be self-hosted, and an English-language Qianfan console exists on Baidu AI Cloud International with an OpenAI-compatible endpoint and multi-language SDKs.
Cons
- The rate card only exists in Chinese yuan on the Chinese Qianfan documentation
- the English international product page carries a Console and Free Trial button but publishes no per-token prices at all, so budgeting means reading the mainland docs. The mainland console requires real-name verification and the new-user credit is a CN¥20 voucher tied to it, the consumer chat product at yiyan.baidu.com has no English version, and the newest releases (ERNIE 5.1, ERNIE-Image) appear on the Chinese platform first.
Cost
Baidu Qianfan pay-as-you-go, list updated 27 August 2026: ERNIE 5.1 CN¥0.004 per 1k input tokens and CN¥0.018 per 1k output for prompts up to 32k (CN¥4/M and CN¥18/M, about $0.56 and $2.54), rising to CN¥6/M and CN¥22/M between 32k and 128k; ERNIE 5.0 CN¥6/M input and CN¥24/M output; ERNIE 4.5 Turbo (32K and 128K) CN¥0.8/M input, CN¥3.2/M output, CN¥0.2/M on cache hits and CN¥4 per triggered search-augmentation call, with batch inference at CN¥0.32/M input and CN¥1.28/M output; ERNIE 4.5 Turbo VL CN¥3/M input and CN¥9/M output. New mainland accounts get a CN¥20 voucher after real-name verification; no USD rate card is published on the international site.
Verdict
Best for teams that need a top-ranked Chinese-language model with a genuine self-host escape hatch in the open-weight ERNIE 4.5 releases, and who can tolerate reading a Chinese rate card — pick it over Doubao when Chinese-language quality and open weights matter more than multimodal breadth.
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