76
Stack Score
Best for
Developers who need a strong open-weight LLM with deep multilingual coverage or who want to self-host frontier-class models.
At a glance
- Pricing
- freemium
- Setup time
- 15 minutes
- Learning curve
- medium
- Last verified
- 5/19/2026
What we love
- ✓Strongest open-weight model family on Chinese benchmarks
- ✓Free chat tier is genuinely useful for daily tasks
- ✓Multilingual range exceeds Llama and Mistral
- ✓Coder variant competitive with GPT-4 on code
Where it falls short
- −Data residency in Alibaba Cloud is a non-starter for some Western enterprises
- −Documentation skews Chinese-first
- −Safety guardrails differ by region — test before deploying
Pricing
✓ Pricing verified Jun 21, 20263 tiers
Free Chat
$0
web only
- ✓Qwen3 access
- ✓File upload
- ✓Image generation
API Pay-as-you-go
From $0.50
per million tokens
- ✓DashScope hosting
- ✓Multiple model sizes
- ✓256K context option
Self-hosted
$0
Apache 2.0 weights
- ✓Open weights
- ✓Commercial use
- ✓Run on your hardware
Why we picked it
Open weights make Qwen interesting for self-hosters; the chat is solid for everyday tasks.
Overview
Alibaba's flagship model family with strong code + math performance and full multimodal support. Free chat at chat.qwen.ai.
Key features
- ●Qwen3 family — base, reasoning, and Coder variants
- ●Strong multilingual performance across 100+ languages
- ●Long context up to 256K on premium tiers
- ●Multimodal: text, image, audio, video inputs
- ●Open-weight releases on Hugging Face
- ●Web chat interface with free access at chat.qwen.ai
- ●API and Alibaba Cloud (DashScope) hosting
Best use cases
Multilingual chat
Serve users in Mandarin, Cantonese, Arabic, and Indonesian with quality matching frontier English-first models.
Self-hosted coding agent
Run Qwen3 Coder on local GPUs for codegen without sending source to third parties.
Cost-sensitive production
Replace OpenAI on routine tasks via Alibaba Cloud API at meaningfully lower per-token rates.
Integrations
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