Qwen (Alibaba) vs Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3)
Which one should you pick? Here's the full breakdown.
Qwen (Alibaba)
Alibaba's open-weights + API family -- Qwen 3.6-Max-Preview (Apr 20 2026 CLOSED-weights #1 on SWE-bench Pro/Terminal-Bench 2.0/SciCode), Qwen3.6-35B-A3B (Apr 16 open-weights coding champion), plus Qwen 3.6-Plus API flagship. Apache 2.0 on most sizes, but the best model is now proprietary
Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3)
Tencent's Hy3 Preview launched 2026-04-23 -- 295B total / 21B active MoE, 256K context, open-sourced on HuggingFace under tencent/Hy3-preview. Cheapest frontier-class API at ~1.2 RMB per million input tokens. Integrated into Yuanbao, WeChat, QQ
| Category | Qwen (Alibaba) | Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3) |
|---|---|---|
| Ease of Use | 7.0 | 7.0 |
| Output Quality | 9.0 | 8.0 |
| Value | 10.0 | 9.5 |
| Features | 9.0 | 8.0 |
| Overall | 8.8 | 8.1 |
Personality & Tone
Qwen (Alibaba): The multilingual Alibaba all-rounder
Tone: Helpful, verbose, and notably strong in Chinese and other non-English languages. Qwen is chattier than Mistral or DeepSeek and tends toward structured, multi-section replies.
Quirks: Best-in-class at Chinese -- occasionally switches to Mandarin mid-response for technical or cultural topics even when prompted in English. Political refusal patterns mirror other Chinese models on China-specific topics.
Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3): Tencent's first serious open-weights LLM
Tone: Direct and structured, similar to DeepSeek's chat tone -- compact answers in technical domains, reasonable Chinese-language polish, English noticeably less expressive than Claude or GPT.
Quirks: PRC content filters apply across the same set of regulated topics as DeepSeek and Qwen. Distribution via Yuanbao + WeChat + QQ means many Hy3 users in the wild are talking to it through chat-app surfaces rather than a developer console.
Pricing Comparison
| Feature | Qwen (Alibaba) | Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3) |
|---|---|---|
| Free Tier | Yes | Yes |
| Starting Price | $0 | $0 |
Benchmark Head-to-Head
Qwen3.5-397B MoE benchmarks — Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3) 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 Qwen (Alibaba) if...
- ✓Higher output quality (9 vs 8)
- ✓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)Pick Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3) if...
Chinese-market builders, multilingual products that need strong CN performance, and cost-sensitive developers who want frontier-class quality at sub-DeepSeek pricing. Also anyone watching the open-weights field who wants Tencent's distribution-backed entry on the bench.
Visit Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3)Our Verdict
Qwen (Alibaba) edges out Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3) with a 8.8 vs 8.1 overall score. Both are solid picks, but Qwen (Alibaba) has the advantage in output quality.