Best Qwen (Alibaba) Alternatives in 2026
Qwen (Alibaba) scores 8.8/10 on our tests. Here are 9 alternatives worth considering in the Local & Open-Weight LLMs space.
Qwen (Alibaba)
Alibaba's open-weights family -- Qwen3.5, Qwen3-Coder-Next, Qwen3-VL, Qwen3-Max. Apache 2.0 flagship sizes.
Top Alternatives, Ranked
MiniMax's open-weights frontier -- first open model to match Claude Opus 4.6 on SWE-Bench at 10-20× lower cost
Google DeepMind's open-weights model family -- multimodal, 256K context, runs on edge devices
Moonshot's 1T-parameter MoE open-weights flagship -- best open-source agentic coder, rivals Claude Opus 4.5
Zhipu AI's open-weights family -- GLM-4.6 text flagship and GLM-4.6V multimodal, true MIT licensed
Meta's open-weights flagship family -- Scout (10M context), Maverick (multimodal 400B MoE), Behemoth in preview
Nvidia's open-weights family -- hybrid Mamba-Transformer MoE architecture, optimized for efficient reasoning on Nvidia hardware
European AI lab with open and commercial models that punch well above their size
UAE's Technology Innovation Institute open-weights family -- Falcon 3 optimized for efficient sub-10B deployment on consumer hardware
Score Comparison
| Tool | Ease of Use | Output Quality | Value | Features | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen (Alibaba)(current) | 7.0 | 9.0 | 10.0 | 9.0 | 8.8 |
| MiniMax M2 / M2.5 | 6.5 | 9.0 | 9.5 | 8.5 | 8.4 |
| Gemma 4 (Google) | 7.0 | 8.0 | 10.0 | 8.0 | 8.3 |
| Kimi K2.5 (Moonshot) | 6.0 | 9.0 | 8.5 | 9.0 | 8.1 |
| DeepSeek | 7.5 | 8.0 | 9.5 | 7.0 | 8.0 |
| GLM / Z.ai (Zhipu AI) | 6.5 | 8.5 | 9.0 | 8.0 | 8.0 |
| Llama 4 (Meta) | 5.0 | 8.5 | 9.0 | 9.0 | 7.9 |
| Nemotron (Nvidia) | 6.5 | 8.0 | 8.0 | 8.5 | 7.8 |
| Mistral AI | 6.0 | 8.0 | 9.0 | 7.0 | 7.5 |
| Falcon (TII) | 7.0 | 6.5 | 9.0 | 6.0 | 7.1 |
Not sure which to pick?
Read our full reviews or use the comparison tool to see how they stack up head-to-head.