CLOVA X Alternatives in 2026: Where to Go After Naver Shut It Down

Naver switched off CLOVA X on 9 April 2026, two years and eight months after the chatbot opened in beta in August 2023.

News Tomato reported the closure two days before it happened, and noted that the Cue: search assistant stopped the same day. The usage numbers in that report explain the decision better than any strategy memo. In the science ministry's 2025 internet usage survey, 41.8% of generative AI users in the country had used ChatGPT. Only 2.0% had tried CLOVA X, behind Gemini at 9.8% and Copilot at 2.2%. Users had left first.

So the question for anyone who relied on CLOVA X is not which local app inherits its seat. Three things settle it: how well the replacement writes and reasons in Korean, whether your data has to stay in the country, and what you will pay. A student, a ten-person agency and a developer who reached HyperCLOVA X through the old app get three different answers.

Hokai chart of the five replacements this guide recommends and the need each one fits, from the sources below as checked on 9 November 2026.

How to choose a CLOVA X replacement: the four questions that decide it

Most "alternatives" lists rank chatbots on English benchmarks and stop there. That is the wrong test here. The old app was sold on one promise, Korean first, so its replacement has to be judged on evidence in that language.

1. Quality in the language, measured by someone other than the vendor. The best public yardstick is the Horangi Korean LLM Leaderboard 4 run by Weights & Biases.
2. Where your data sits, and where it is processed. Those are two different promises.
3. What it costs in the currency you will be billed in. List prices are in dollars; checkout is usually local.
4. What you actually used the old app for. Chat, search through Cue:, or the developer route to the model.

On the first question, the leaderboard scores each model on two axes. One is general language performance (GLP), which covers grammar, meaning, expression, knowledge, reasoning and coding. The other is alignment (ALT): control, ethics, harmful content, bias and hallucination. Its GitHub README describes the suite as 20 or more benchmarks, and the same tasks are run against every model, open or closed.

On the second, storage "at rest" in the country is common on business plans. Processing in the country is rare. A vendor can keep your chat history on a disk in Seoul and still send every prompt abroad to be answered.

If you answer the four questions in order, the shortlist below mostly picks itself. For a wider view of general chat apps, the AI chatbots directory lists every assistant Hokai tracks.

The shortlist: five CLOVA X alternatives, one job each

The scores are final scores from the leaderboard's main table, which was last updated on 29 April 2026 and read by Hokai on 9 November 2026. A score of 1.0 would be perfect on every task. The gap between first and twentieth place is under 0.08, so treat the order as a shortlist, not a podium.

Two of the five are not even separate products from the reader's side. One lives inside a messenger most people already have open, and one is the same model the old app ran, now sold in pieces. The other three are the global assistants that most users had already moved to before the closure, if the survey above is any guide.

Hokai chart of how few generative AI users had tried CLOVA X before it closed, from the science ministry survey as reported by News Tomato, checked on 9 November 2026.

ChatGPT: the default, and it already lives in KakaoTalk

ChatGPT is the safe answer for most former users, partly on quality and partly on reach. On the leaderboard, GPT-5.5 at its highest reasoning setting scored 0.8178, third overall, with 0.8276 on general language. GPT-5.6 Sol followed at 0.8067.

The reach argument is local. Kakao said in a 16 June 2026 press release that users can now add a ChatGPT chatbot to group and one-on-one chats in its messenger and call it by typing "@ChatGPT", including for image generation. The service behind it launched in October 2025 through the company's partnership with OpenAI. Kakao reported more than 11 million cumulative subscribers as of May.

That matters if your team already lives in that messenger. You get a strong model in the language without installing anything new. The Kakao company profile covers its own models too.

OpenAI lists Plus at $20 a month in the US, as recorded on Hokai's ChatGPT page when it was last checked on 22 October 2026. When Hokai opened the pricing page on 9 November 2026, it showed local currency rather than dollars, so expect a won price at checkout. The ChatGPT plans guide breaks down every tier.

Gemini: the highest score on the board

Gemini has the strongest independent result of any assistant here. Gemini 3.1 Pro preview topped the leaderboard with 0.8414. It scored 0.8343 on general language and 0.8485 on alignment, the highest alignment score in the table's top 20 rows. The Gemini 3.1 Pro record carries its specs.

The quieter finding is lower down. Gemini 3.5 Flash, the faster tier, placed fourth at 0.8119. That puts it above several flagship models from other labs.

Pick it if accuracy in the language is the deciding factor and you already work in Google's office apps. Hokai's Gemini record lists Google AI Pro at $19.99 a month and Google AI Plus at $4.99, both read from the vendor's plans page on 2 November 2026. Prices are set by country here too; the plans page showed a non-dollar local price to Hokai on 9 November. The Claude vs Gemini comparison covers the two head to head.

Claude: the pick for long writing

Claude placed second through Claude Fable 5, with a final score of 0.8262. Its general language score of 0.8393 was the highest of any model in the table's top 20 rows. Alignment pulled it below the leader: 0.8132.

That split fits a specific reader. Writers. If your old habit was drafting reports, rewriting emails or translating long documents, language quality is what you feel every day. Claude Sonnet 5 scored 0.7864.

The vendor's pricing page, read on 9 November 2026, lists four personal plans:

• Free, with no charge
• Pro at $20 a month billed monthly, or $17 a month on a $200 annual plan
• Max at $100 a month
• Ultra at $200 a month

The ChatGPT vs Claude guide is the head-to-head if you are torn between the top two.

Wrtn: the locally made app, running someone else's model

Wrtn is the closest thing to a like-for-like swap: a local company, a local interface, and a free account. When Hokai opened its home page on 9 November 2026, the menu offered free sign-up, chat, AI text detection, video summaries, real-time recording and a GPT-5 option.

That last item is the point. The app does not appear on the leaderboard, and Hokai's record for it notes that it runs licensed OpenAI models rather than one it trains itself. Its quality in the language is therefore roughly the quality of the model it routes you to, wrapped in a friendlier app.

Hokai could not read a current paid price on the site, so none is quoted here. If you used the old app for casual chat rather than work, character-chat apps are a separate category: Scatter Lab runs one called Zeta, covered in the AI companion apps guide.

HyperCLOVA X: the model outlived the app

Naver closed the chatbot, not the model. That distinction matters. HyperCLOVA X now reaches people two ways: open weights you download, and managed access through the company's cloud.

The flagship open release is SEED 32B Think. According to its model card, it is a 32-billion-parameter vision-language model with a 128K-token context, an optional thinking mode, and a knowledge cutoff of May 2025. The card's serving example runs the language model on two GPUs with about 60GB of memory.

Weights & Biases tested it in its first sovereign foundation model evaluation, updated 29 January 2026. Of five locally built models, SEED 32B Think placed fourth overall by a narrow margin. It ranked first on bias prevention and on ethics, and used 5.8 million tokens to finish the run, up to 5.5 times fewer than its rivals.

The licence has a catch. Section 4 of the SEED 32B Think licence says a company with more than 10 million monthly active users, or one offering a product that competes with the maker's, must request a separate licence first.

Managed access runs through CLOVA Studio on NAVER Cloud Platform, the cloud arm of Naver. Hokai's own record for that cloud is not live yet. When Hokai opened the CLOVA Studio product page on 9 November 2026, it did not display a readable rate card, so no token price is quoted here.

Test a replacement in your own work before you pay

A leaderboard tells you which model is better on average. It cannot tell you which one is better at your job. The cheapest way to find out is a one-week trial on the free tiers, run the same way for each candidate.

1. Collect ten real prompts from your old chat history or sent mail.
2. Run each one on two or three assistants on the same day, with no extra instructions.
3. Score the answers blind, with a colleague who does not know which tool wrote which.
4. Check every fact an answer gives you: dates, numbers, legal references.
5. Note where it refuses or stalls on a normal business request.

Good test prompts are ordinary: a report summary, a polite refusal to a client, a contract clause, a spreadsheet question. Real work beats invented tests. Formality, honorifics and tone are where models still differ most, and a native reader spots the difference in seconds. A model that declines a normal request costs you more time than one that is slightly less fluent.

Keep the scores in a simple table. After a week, the winner is usually obvious, and it is often not the one at the top of the public board. That is fine. The board is a filter, not a verdict.

Locally built models worth a look for builders

If you are a developer replacing a HyperCLOVA X integration, the sovereign evaluation is the most useful document published this year. It tested five models built under the government-backed programme on the same leaderboard tasks.

Two cautions apply. These scores come from a separate report and should not be read against the 0.84 figures above. And the version tested in January was the 236B model; LG AI Research has since released K-EXAONE 2.0 on 31 July 2026, under the Apache 2.0 licence according to Hokai's record.

Upstage also sells Solar Pro 4 through an API, and Kakao publishes open weights as Kanana-2. For a cross-lab view of price, speed and benchmark figures, the model leaderboard shows each model's published numbers side by side. The open-weight models guide covers self-hosting in depth.

Enterprise buyers who want a finished product rather than a model have two regional vendors to call. According to their Hokai profiles, Sionic AI sells STORM, a no-code agent platform that can run on-premise, and Allganize sells document agents that can run air-gapped.

What CLOVA X alternatives cost in 2026

The old app was free, so any paid plan is new spending. The good news: every global pick has a free tier, and the paid tiers cluster around $20.

• Google AI Pro19.99 Leader
• ChatGPT Plus20
• Claude Pro20

Read from claude.com on 9 November 2026 and from Hokai's ChatGPT and Gemini records.

All three dollar prices are list prices in the vendor's own currency. Buyers in the country are billed in won at checkout, at a price each vendor sets for that market, and tax rules can differ. Hokai does not convert those figures, because a converted number would be wrong the day the rate moves.

The free tiers are worth more than they look. For a person who used the old app a few times a week, a free plan from any of the three will likely cover the same ground. The paid tier earns its cost when you hit message limits, need the strongest model for long documents, or want the extra features each vendor reserves for paying users.

Self-hosting has its own bill. If you run SEED 32B Think on KakaoCloud, Hokai's record for that cloud (checked 2 November 2026) lists a single-card A100 instance from 5,334 won an hour and a T4 instance from 648 won an hour. The model card's two-GPU example implies at least two cards for the 32B model.

Where your data lives: residency in Korea, plan by plan

This is where former users have the most to lose, and the answer depends on your plan, not the brand.

OpenAI announced data residency in Asia on 7 May 2025, covering four countries including South Korea. Its post says eligible API customers and new Enterprise and Edu workspaces can store customer content at rest in the country. It does not mention Free, Go or Plus, and it describes storage, not where answers are generated.

The data residency page for Google's cloud AI platform separates the two promises. Data at rest stays in the location you choose, but model processing stays inside a country only when you call a regional endpoint for a model that the page lists as supported in that country, and for Seoul that list is very short. In the Seoul column, read on 9 November 2026, only Gemini 2.5 Flash was marked supported. The table of partner models, which includes the Claude family, had no column for the country at all.

Hokai found no page from Anthropic offering residency in the country for Claude itself. That is a gap, not a verdict; ask the vendor's sales team if it matters to you.

So the only option that keeps both storage and processing inside the country, on terms you control, is to host an open model yourself on local infrastructure. KakaoCloud runs three live Seoul zones and lists ISMS-P and CSAP certification, according to its Hokai record. The private AI guide covers the wider set of self-hosted choices.

Who should skip a switch, or stay with Naver

Not everyone needs a new assistant.

• People who used the old app through search. News Tomato reported that Naver is moving its AI into its services instead.
• Developers already on CLOVA Studio. The managed API did not close with the app.
• Companies near 10 million monthly users. The SEED licence changes at that line.
• Teams that only need translation. A dedicated tool may serve better; see the AI translation guide.

On the first point, the same report named a shopping agent in the portal's store since February and a conversational "AI tab" that was planned, as of April, for the first half of 2026. If the portal is where you search, its own AI features are the path of least effort.

On the second, rewriting a working integration for a small gain on a public leaderboard is rarely worth it. On the third, talk to the maker before you build anything on the open weights.

The case for staying local, and the signs that would flip it

A sovereignty argument is the best objection to all of this. A model trained on local data, sold by a local company and governed by local law answers to local regulators in a way a US lab does not. SEED 32B Think also topped the sovereign evaluation on bias and ethics, the two alignment tests most tied to local norms.

That objection is real, and for a regulated buyer it can decide the matter. But it is an argument about governance, not quality. On the main leaderboard, the global models led overall. And the residency difference only exists on business plans; a person moving to a free consumer app gains nothing on that front by choosing a local brand that runs an American model.

Three things would flip the verdict, and they are worth watching:

• A locally built model topping the main leaderboard, not only the sovereign report.
• A global vendor promising processing in the country, not just storage, on plans individuals can buy.
• A public CLOVA Studio rate card that undercuts the global APIs.

If your situation mixes several of these constraints, Smart Match can weigh them against Hokai's full catalogue and return a shortlist for your case. The broader ChatGPT alternatives guide is the next step if you want to look beyond these five.

The verdict by reader

For a business, start with ChatGPT or Gemini on a plan with local storage, and keep SEED 32B Think in reserve for the workloads a contract says cannot leave the country. For an individual, pick the free tier of whichever of the top three fits your work, and pay only when you hit its limits.

Naver kept the model and dropped the app. Weights & Biases labels its sovereign report as round one, so the next round is where that bet gets measured: same tasks, newer rivals, and a 32B model that has to keep pace with 236B ones.

Frequently asked questions

Is CLOVA X still available in 2026?

No. Naver closed the CLOVA X chatbot on 9 April 2026, and its Cue: search assistant stopped the same day, according to News Tomato. The underlying HyperCLOVA X model is still available as open SEED weights on Hugging Face and through CLOVA Studio on NAVER Cloud Platform.

What is the best CLOVA X alternative for Korean?

On the Horangi 4 Korean leaderboard from Weights & Biases, Gemini 3.1 Pro preview scored highest at 0.8414, followed by Claude Fable 5 at 0.8262 and GPT-5.5 at 0.8178. Claude Fable 5 had the highest general Korean language score in the top 20 rows. ChatGPT is the practical default because it also runs inside KakaoTalk.

Which CLOVA X alternative keeps my data in Korea?

OpenAI stores customer content at rest in Korea for ChatGPT Enterprise, Edu and the API, not for Free or Plus. Google's cloud platform lists in-Seoul model processing only for Gemini 2.5 Flash. Self-hosting HyperCLOVA X SEED on Korean infrastructure such as KakaoCloud is the only route that keeps both storage and processing in the country.

How much do CLOVA X alternatives cost?

Each global pick has a free tier. Claude Pro is $20 a month, or $17 on annual billing, per claude.com on 9 November 2026. ChatGPT Plus is listed at $20 and Google AI Pro at $19.99 on Hokai's records, and Korean buyers are billed a local won price set by each vendor.

Can I still use HyperCLOVA X after CLOVA X closed?

Yes. HyperCLOVA X SEED 32B Think is free to download from Hugging Face, with a 128K-token context. Its licence requires companies above 10 million monthly active users, or with products competing with Naver, to request a separate licence. Managed access remains through CLOVA Studio.

Covered in this guide

• CLOVA X: CLOVA X is Naver's free Korean AI chatbot built on the 82B-parameter HyperCLOVA X model, scoring 84.14 on the HAE-RAE Bench versus 68.2 for rival LLMs.
• Allganize: Tokyo-based Allganize builds Alli, a suite of enterprise AI agents for documents and workflows, with a Seoul office and a listing planned for November 2026.
• ChatGPT: ChatGPT is OpenAI's AI assistant, with 1.2 billion weekly users by OpenAI's count, the GPT-6 model family and plans that run from a free tier to a premium Pro tier.
• Claude: Claude is Anthropic's AI assistant, with a free tier, Pro, Max and Ultra personal plans, and Team and Enterprise seats. Opus access starts at Pro.
• Claude Fable 5: The first generally available Mythos-class Claude model, with 1M context and 95.0% SWE-bench Verified. Released June 2026 by Anthropic.
• Claude Sonnet 5: Claude Sonnet 5, released by Anthropic on June 30, 2026, hits 82.1% SWE-bench Verified with a 1M-token context window.
• Gemini: Google's multimodal AI assistant and model family, sold as a free app, tiered subscriptions and a pay-per-token API
• Gemini 3.1 Pro: Gemini 3.1 Pro tops the GPQA Diamond scores of Claude Opus and GPT-5.2 on Google’s own model card, and takes a million tokens of mixed text, image, audio and video input.
• Gemini 3.5 Flash: Gemini 3.5 Flash (May 19, 2026) scores 78% SWE-bench Verified and 83.6% MCP Atlas with a 1M-token multimodal context, at $1.50/$9 per 1M tokens.
• GPT-5.5: GPT-5.5 is OpenAI's April 2026 flagship model for agentic coding and knowledge work, with a 1.05M-token API context window and text and image input.
• HyperCLOVA X: Naver's HyperCLOVA X family runs from free SEED weights on Hugging Face to managed CLOVA Studio models, led by an open reasoning model that reads text, images and video.
• K-EXAONE 2.0: Open-weight mixture-of-experts model from LG AI Research, released in July 2026, with ten supported languages and a hybrid attention design.
• Kakao: Kakao is the Jeju City-based internet company behind KakaoTalk, and since 2025 the publisher of the Kanana open-weight language models on Hugging Face.
• KakaoCloud: Seoul-region cloud from Kakao Enterprise with 41 services, NVIDIA GPU and NPU instances, a public-sector region and per-minute billing.
• Kanana-2: Open-weight mixture-of-experts chat model from Kakao, released January 2026, with 3B active parameters and six supported languages.
• LG AI Research: LG AI Research is the Seoul-based AI lab behind the EXAONE model family, including the open-weight K-EXAONE flagship released in July 2026.
• Naver: Naver, founded in 1999, is South Korea's largest internet portal, running Search, Webtoon and Naver Cloud, and building the HyperCLOVA X AI model family.
• Scatter Lab: Seoul AI company behind the Zeta character chat app, launched 1 April 2024 and reporting 2 million sign-ups in its first year (company figure).
• Sionic AI: Seoul enterprise AI company founded in 2023 that builds STORM, a no-code platform for company AI agents, with about 50 staff and offices in Seoul and Tokyo.
• Solar Pro 4: Upstage's agent-first flagship LLM, released 2026, built for coding agents and long-document review rather than single-shot chat or multimodal tasks.
• Upstage: Seoul-based AI company behind the Solar LLM family and Document Parse OCR, valued at $1B as South Korea's first generative-AI unicorn.
• Wrtn: Wrtn, from a Seoul startup founded in 2021, is a Korean-first AI superapp bundling free chat, search, image generation and character chat.

Sources