Cohere Command A vs Qwen (Alibaba)
Which one should you pick? Here's the full breakdown.
Cohere Command A
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
Qwen (Alibaba)
Alibaba's open-weights + API family -- Qwen 3.6-Plus (Mar 30 2026, 1M context + always-on CoT + agentic tool-use), Qwen3.5 Small (2B runs on iPhone, 9B matches 120B-class models), plus Qwen3.5-Omni native multimodal. Apache 2.0 on the open sizes
| Category | Cohere Command A | Qwen (Alibaba) |
|---|---|---|
| Ease of Use | 6.5 | 7.0 |
| Output Quality | 8.5 | 9.0 |
| Value | 7.0 | 10.0 |
| Features | 8.0 | 9.0 |
| Overall | 7.5 | 8.8 |
Pricing Comparison
| Feature | Cohere Command A | Qwen (Alibaba) |
|---|---|---|
| Free Tier | Yes | Yes |
| Starting Price | $0 | $0 |
Benchmark Head-to-Head
Qwen3.5-397B MoE benchmarks — Cohere Command A has no published benchmarks
| Benchmark | Description | Score |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU-Pro | Harder multi-subject reasoning | 83.5% |
| GPQA Diamond | Graduate-level science questions | 78.2% |
| AIME 2025 | 87% | |
| HumanEval | Python code generation | 92.5% |
| SWE-Bench Verified | 69.4% |
Which Should You Pick?
Pick Cohere Command A if...
Mid-size to large enterprises needing a multilingual open-weight model with low-ish infrastructure requirements (2x H100 for full model). Especially good for retrieval-augmented generation over internal document stores, multi-language customer support, and workflows touching Asian / Middle Eastern / African languages where Command A's coverage materially beats Llama or Mistral. Also a strong pick for teams already in Cohere's enterprise ecosystem.
Visit Cohere Command APick Qwen (Alibaba) if...
- ✓Better value for money (10/10)
- ✓More features (9 vs 8)
Developers who want frontier-tier open weights with Apache 2.0 licensing. Qwen3-Coder-Next is arguably the best local coding model; Qwen3.5-397B is a top-3 open generalist.
Visit Qwen (Alibaba)Our Verdict
Qwen (Alibaba) is the clear winner here with 8.8/10 vs 7.5/10. Cohere Command A isn't bad, but Qwen (Alibaba) outperforms it across the board. Pick Cohere Command A only if mid-size to large enterprises needing a multilingual open-weight model with low-ish infrastructure requirements (2x h100 for full model).