What is Cohere Command?
Cohere Command is a family of large language models from Cohere, a Canadian company focused on enterprise rather than consumer chat. The models are tuned for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool use, and business workflows, and ship alongside Cohere's Embed and Rerank models for search.
You use Command through the Cohere API and the North workspace app, or you deploy it privately inside your own cloud or virtual private cloud, which is the option many regulated companies choose. Its Aya models add broad multilingual coverage.
Command is the family to evaluate when your priority is grounding answers in your own documents, keeping data inside your environment, and integrating AI into enterprise software rather than offering a public chatbot.
What it's best for
- Retrieval-augmented generation: answering over your own documents with citations, paired with Cohere's Embed and Rerank models.
- Private deployment: running the models inside your own cloud or VPC for data residency and governance.
- Tool use and agents inside business applications and internal software.
- Multilingual work, including lower-resource languages through the Aya models.
- Enterprise search and knowledge assistants where accuracy and grounding matter more than open-ended chat.
Where it falls short
- A polished consumer chatbot experience: Cohere targets developers and enterprises, not casual end users.
- Native image, audio, or video generation. The Command models are text and tool-use focused.
- The absolute cheapest hobby use; the value shows up in enterprise RAG and private deployment, not free consumer tiers.
Where to start
Developers start in the Cohere API and dashboard: get a key, call Command for generation and Embed plus Rerank for search. The North app is the workspace front end for teams.
For grounded answers, combine Embed (to index your documents), Rerank (to order the best passages), and Command (to generate an answer that cites them).
Private and cloud deployment
Cohere supports deployment through major cloud marketplaces and private installations inside your own environment, which keeps your data and the model under your control. This is the common path for finance, healthcare, and the public sector.
Because the models are built for RAG and tool use, they slot into existing enterprise stacks rather than requiring you to adopt a separate consumer product.
Getting better answers
Pass the model the retrieved documents and ask it to answer only from them and to cite the source for each claim, which reduces invented facts.
For multilingual deployments, evaluate the Aya models on your specific languages before committing.
What Cohere Command costs
Approximate, in USD, as of January 2026. Prices change often. Confirm on the official site before you rely on them.
Trial / dashboard
$0
Free rate-limited keys for evaluation in the Cohere dashboard.
API
Usage-based
Priced per million tokens for Command, and per unit for Embed and Rerank.
Private / enterprise deployment
Custom
Deployment inside your cloud or VPC with enterprise terms, security, and support.
Example prompts
Copy these into Cohere Command as starting points, then adapt them to your task.
Answer the question using only the documents provided. Cite the source document for every claim. If the documents do not contain the answer, say so rather than guessing.
You can call the following tools: {tools}. Plan how to answer the user request, call the tools you need, then give a final answer that references what each tool returned.Draft a support reply in the customer's language based on the knowledge-base article below. Keep the company's tone, and do not add information that is not in the article.
Given this query and these candidate passages, rank them by relevance and explain why the top passage best answers the query.
Cohere Command
common questions.
Direct answers to the questions we get asked the most. If yours isn't covered, write to the team.