Best LongCat-2.0 (Meituan) Alternatives in 2026

LongCat-2.0 (Meituan) scores 7.9/10 on our tests. Here are 18 alternatives worth considering in the Local & Open-Weight LLMs space.

LongCat-2.0 (Meituan) logo

LongCat-2.0 (Meituan)

B

Meituan's open-source 1.6T-parameter MoE (~48B active) with native 1M-token context, MIT license -- trained entirely on domestic Chinese AI ASICs and revealed as the stealth 'Owl Alpha' model that had been topping OpenRouter

7.9
Current pick

Top Alternatives, Ranked

1Qwen (Alibaba) logo
Qwen (Alibaba)
A
+0.9 higher

Alibaba's open-weights + API family -- Qwen 3.7 Max flagship GA (May 20 2026: SWE-Bench Pro 60.6%, Terminal-Bench 69.7%, GPQA 92.4%, $2.50/$7.50 per 1M with 50% promo until 6/22), Qwen3.7-Plus multimodal API (Jun 2), Qwen3.6-27B dense Apache 2.0 (beats the 397B MoE on coding from one consumer GPU)

Overall: 8.8/10Free tier availableFrom $0
2MiniMax M3 logo
MiniMax M3
A
+0.5 higher

MiniMax's coding/agent flagship -- M3 (June 1 2026): 1M-token context, MSA sparse attention (>15x decoding speedup at long context), SWE-Bench Pro 59.0%, Terminal-Bench 66.0%. OPEN WEIGHTS LIVE on HuggingFace since June 12 (~428B total / ~23B active, native multimodal, minimax-community license)

Overall: 8.4/10Free tier availableFrom $0
3Gemma 4 (Google) logo
Gemma 4 (Google)
A
+0.4 higher

Google DeepMind's open-weights model family -- multimodal, 256K context, runs on edge devices

Overall: 8.3/10Free tier availableFrom $0
4IBM Granite 4.0 logo
IBM Granite 4.0
A
+0.3 higher

IBM's enterprise-focused open-weight family -- Granite 4.0 hybrid Mamba-2 + transformer architecture (70-80% memory reduction vs pure transformer), 3B to 32B sizes, Apache 2.0. First open model family to secure ISO 42001 certification. Nano 350M runs on CPU with 8-16GB RAM. 3B Vision variant landed 2026-04-01

Overall: 8.2/10Free tier availableFrom $0
5Kimi K2.6 (Moonshot) logo

Moonshot's 1T-parameter MoE open-weights flagship -- Kimi K2.6 (GA 2026-04-20) is #1 open-weights on Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.0 (score 54, ranked #4 overall). Native video input, 256K context, Modified MIT license

Overall: 8.1/10Free tier availableFrom $0
6gpt-oss (OpenAI) logo
gpt-oss (OpenAI)
A
+0.2 higher

OpenAI's FIRST open-weight models -- gpt-oss-120b (single 80GB GPU, near parity with o4-mini on reasoning) and gpt-oss-20b (runs on 16GB edge devices). Apache 2.0. Launched 2025-08-05. gpt-oss-safeguard ships in 2026 as the safety-tuned variant

Overall: 8.1/10Free tier availableFrom $0
7Arcee Trinity-Large-Thinking logo

Arcee AI's US-made open-weight frontier reasoning model -- launched 2026-04-01. 398B total params, ~13B active. Sparse MoE (256 experts, 4 active = 1.56% routing). Apache 2.0, trained from scratch. #2 on PinchBench trailing only Claude 3.5 Opus. ~96% cheaper than Opus-4.6 on agentic tasks

Overall: 8.1/10Free tier availableFrom $0
8DeepSeek logo
DeepSeek
A
+0.1 higher

DeepSeek V4 shipped 2026-04-24: V4-Pro (1.6T/49B active MoE) + V4-Flash (284B/13B active), 1M native context, Hybrid Attention Architecture, open-source on HF. Trails only Gemini 3.1 Pro on world knowledge

Overall: 8.0/10Free tier availableFrom $0
9GLM / Z.ai (Zhipu AI) logo

Zhipu AI's open-weights flagship -- GLM-5.2 (launched 2026-06-13) is a ~753B-parameter MoE with a 1M-token context and the new IndexShare sparse-attention architecture (~2.9x lower per-token FLOPs at 1M context), MIT licensed. Vendor benchmarks put SWE-Bench Pro at 62.1 (up from GLM-5.1's 58.4) and it tops the Artificial Analysis open-weights Intelligence Index; VentureBeat reports it beats GPT-5.5 on several long-horizon coding benchmarks at roughly 1/6 the cost. Drop-in for Claude Code / Cline / OpenCode. Still trained outside the Nvidia stack on Huawei Ascend silicon

Overall: 8.0/10Free tier availableFrom $0
10AI21 Jamba2 logo
AI21 Jamba2
A
+0.1 higher

AI21 Labs' hybrid SSM-Transformer (Mamba-style) open-weight family -- Jamba2 launched 2026-01-08. Two sizes: 3B dense (runs on phones / laptops) and Jamba2 Mini MoE (12B active / 52B total). Apache 2.0, 256K context, mid-trained on 500B tokens

Overall: 8.0/10Free tier availableFrom $0
11Llama 4 (Meta) logo

Meta's open-weights family -- Scout (10M context), Maverick (multimodal 400B MoE). NOTE: Meta's frontier work moved to the proprietary Muse Spark line in April 2026; Llama remains downloadable and supported but is effectively in maintenance mode

Overall: 7.9/10Free tier availableFrom $0
12Olmo 3 (AI2) logo

Allen Institute for AI's fully-open frontier reasoning models -- Olmo 3 family (2025-11-20) includes 7B and 32B sizes, four variants (Base, Think, Instruct, RLZero). Apache 2.0 with fully open data + checkpoints + training logs. Olmo 3-Think 32B matches Qwen3-32B-Thinking at 6x fewer training tokens

Overall: 7.9/10Free tier availableFrom $0
13Nemotron (Nvidia) logo

Nvidia's open-weights family -- hybrid Mamba-Transformer MoE architecture, optimized for efficient reasoning on Nvidia hardware. Nemotron 3 Ultra (550B total / 55B active) shipped 2026-06-04 as the family flagship, joining Super (120B/12B, March) and Nano

Overall: 7.8/10Free tier availableFrom $0
14StepFun Step 3.7 Flash logo

StepFun's (China) agent-focused open-weight family -- Step 3.7 Flash (May 28 2026): 198B sparse MoE vision-language model, ~11B active, 256K context, Apache 2.0, ~400 tok/s, SWE-Bench Pro 56.3. Supersedes Step 3.5 Flash (Feb 2026) as the flagship

Overall: 7.8/10Free tier availableFrom $0
15Mistral AI logo

European AI lab with open and commercial models -- Le Chat is now **Vibe** (May 28 2026): one agent across Work Mode + Code Mode with a VS Code extension and CLI, powered by Mistral Medium 3.5 (128B dense, 256k context, 77.6% SWE-Bench Verified). Earlier 2026 line: Small 4 (119B MoE Apache 2.0), Medium 3, Voxtral TTS

Overall: 7.5/10Free tier availableFrom $0
16Cohere Command A logo

Cohere's enterprise-multilingual flagship -- 111B params, 256K context, runs on 2x H100. 23 languages. CC-BY-NC 4.0 on weights (research / non-commercial), commercial requires Cohere enterprise contract. Follow-ups: Command A Reasoning + Command A Vision

Overall: 7.5/10Free tier availableFrom $0
17Falcon (TII) logo

UAE's Technology Innovation Institute open-weights family -- Falcon 3 optimized for efficient sub-10B deployment on consumer hardware

Overall: 7.1/10Free tier availableFrom $0
18DiffusionGemma (Google) logo

Google DeepMind's experimental open-weights TEXT-DIFFUSION model (June 10, 2026) -- 26B MoE (3.8B active), Apache 2.0, generates 256-token blocks in parallel with bidirectional attention for up to 4x faster output (1,000+ tok/s on H100). Trades some quality vs Gemma 4 for raw speed

Overall: 6.8/10Free tier availableFrom $0

Score Comparison

ToolEase of UseOutput QualityValueFeaturesOverall
LongCat-2.0 (Meituan)(current)6.08.59.08.07.9
Qwen (Alibaba)7.09.010.09.08.8
MiniMax M36.59.09.58.58.4
Gemma 4 (Google)7.08.010.08.08.3
IBM Granite 4.07.08.09.58.58.2
Kimi K2.6 (Moonshot)6.09.08.59.08.1
gpt-oss (OpenAI)7.08.510.07.08.1
Arcee Trinity-Large-Thinking6.09.09.58.08.1
DeepSeek7.58.09.57.08.0
GLM / Z.ai (Zhipu AI)6.58.59.08.08.0
AI21 Jamba26.58.09.08.58.0
Llama 4 (Meta)5.08.59.09.07.9
Olmo 3 (AI2)6.08.09.58.07.9
Nemotron (Nvidia)6.58.08.08.57.8
StepFun Step 3.7 Flash6.08.09.08.07.8
Mistral AI6.08.09.07.07.5
Cohere Command A6.58.57.08.07.5
Falcon (TII)7.06.59.06.07.1
DiffusionGemma (Google)6.06.59.06.06.8

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