DeepSeek vs Qwen (Alibaba)
Which one should you pick? Here's the full breakdown.
DeepSeek
Near-frontier reasoning for pennies on the dollar -- the open-source LLM that made Silicon Valley nervous
Qwen (Alibaba)
Alibaba's open-weights family -- Qwen3.5, Qwen3-Coder-Next, Qwen3-VL, Qwen3-Max. Apache 2.0 flagship sizes.
| Category | DeepSeek | Qwen (Alibaba) |
|---|---|---|
| Ease of Use | 7.5 | 7.0 |
| Output Quality | 8.0 | 9.0 |
| Value | 9.5 | 10.0 |
| Features | 7.0 | 9.0 |
| Overall | 8.0 | 8.8 |
Pricing Comparison
| Feature | DeepSeek | Qwen (Alibaba) |
|---|---|---|
| Free Tier | Yes | Yes |
| Starting Price | $0 | $0 |
Benchmark Head-to-Head
DeepSeek V3.2 vs Qwen3.5-397B MoE
| Benchmark | DeepSeek | Qwen (Alibaba) |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU-Pro | 85% | 83.5% |
| GPQA Diamond | 79.9% | 78.2% |
| HumanEval | 91.5% | 92.5% |
Which Should You Pick?
Pick DeepSeek if...
- ✓Stronger on graduate-level science questions (+1.7% on GPQA Diamond)
Developers and teams who need strong reasoning and coding capabilities on a budget. If you're building AI features and can't justify GPT-4 API costs, DeepSeek is the obvious first stop.
Visit DeepSeekPick Qwen (Alibaba) if...
- ✓Higher output quality (9 vs 8)
- ✓More features (9 vs 7)
- ✓Stronger on python code generation (+1.0% on HumanEval)
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) edges out DeepSeek with a 8.8 vs 8.0 overall score. Both are solid picks, but Qwen (Alibaba) has the advantage in output quality.