ChatGPT Alternatives That Work in China: 10 Options
ChatGPT — OpenAI's general-purpose assistant, the most widely used AI product. Not reachable from mainland China; signup also requires a non-mainland phone number. If you are in mainland China, the tools below cover similar ground and can be used directly.
Why look for an alternative
ChatGPT is a capable tool, but it is not available from mainland China without workarounds, and payment and account sign-up are often blocked too. The options below are reachable directly, which matters most if you use the tool every day.
Alternatives to ChatGPT
- 1DeepSeekOpen-weight Chinese model with near-frontier reasoning at a fraction of the cost
DeepSeek is the most consequential Chinese model of the past two years. It reaches close to frontier-level reasoning while charging a small fraction of what comparable APIs cost — for individual developers and small teams, that difference often decides whether an idea is viable at all.
- 2DoubaoByteDance's chat assistant, the most widely used in China
Doubao is ByteDance's chat assistant and one of the most widely used AI assistants in China. It runs on ByteDance's own Doubao models and is positioned as a general-purpose helper for everyone: Q&A, quick copywriting, translation, photo recognition and voice chat are all covered.
- 3KimiMoonshot AI's model, built around long-document handling and natural Chinese
Kimi is the assistant from Moonshot AI, and the Chinese assistant that has invested most in long-document handling. Upload a few hundred thousand characters and ask questions, and it locates specific passages and connects information across chapters more reliably than most alternatives at this price. It is well suited to research summaries and working through reference material.
- 4QwenAlibaba's assistant, strong on long documents and office work
Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen) is Alibaba's AI assistant, built on Alibaba's Qwen models. That family also ships many open-weight releases in a range of sizes and is well regarded by developers; plenty of projects in China and abroad use it as a base for their own work.
- 5Tencent YuanbaoTencent's assistant, with access to WeChat article search
Tencent Yuanbao is Tencent's AI assistant, and its distinguishing feature is searching WeChat Official Account articles — content that general search engines index poorly, which makes it useful for Chinese-language primary sources.
- 6ChatGLMZhipu AI's GLM assistant, with academic roots
ChatGLM (Zhipu Qingyan) is Zhipu AI's chat assistant, built on Zhipu's own GLM models. Zhipu grew out of a Tsinghua research group, and its GLM models were among the earliest Chinese LLMs, with regular open-weight releases that have earned it standing among academics and developers.
- 7ERNIE BotBaidu's AI assistant, closely tied to Baidu Search and its Chinese content
ERNIE Bot (Wenxin Yiyan) is Baidu's assistant built on its in-house ERNIE models, and one of the first Chinese AI products opened to the general public. Its main advantage is not that the model stands out on its own, but that it sits on top of Baidu's search engine, encyclopedia and document library — a natural edge when you are looking up Chinese-language information or writing Chinese material.
- 8iFlytek SparkiFlytek's assistant, strongest at voice, education and office work
iFlytek Spark (Xinghuo) is the AI assistant from iFlytek, a company that has spent more than two decades on speech recognition and speech synthesis. That background shows: voice input is accurate, read-aloud sounds natural, and you can hold a continuous spoken conversation with it more comfortably than with many competitors.
- 9Tiangong AIKunlun Tech's assistant: AI search roots, now agents that produce files
Tiangong AI is the assistant from Kunlun Tech (Kunlun Wanwei). It started out selling itself on AI search: it looks things up first, then writes a sourced answer, which makes it more useful for research than a pure chat model. Over time the focus has shifted to "super agents" — having the AI produce finished deliverables such as documents, slide decks, spreadsheets and web pages rather than just a block of text.
- 10Le ChatMistral AI's assistant from France: fast replies, with an EU privacy angle
Le Chat is the assistant from Mistral AI, the French company that is Europe's best-known model maker. Mistral built its reputation on open-weight models, and many developers have run one of them locally at some point. Le Chat is its consumer product, positioned against ChatGPT and available on the web and as a mobile app.
These are external services we do not operate. Pricing and features change often — the official site is the authority. Mainland China reachability is based partly on testing and partly on public information; it can change and may differ on your network.