Qwen

Excellent

by Alibaba Cloud · founded 2023 · updated Jul 2026

Qwen is Alibaba Cloud's family of large language models spanning open-weight (Apache 2.0) and proprietary tiers, covering text, vision, audio, and coding use cases. It is available via the free Qwen Chat web/app, the Alibaba Cloud Model Studio API, or self-hosted from Hugging Face and ModelScope for teams needing on-prem control.

LLMs & AssistantsFreemiumEstablishedFrom Free (open-weight, self-hosted) / API from ~$0.05 per 1M input tokens

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84.1TIP Score

Excellent

The score, taken apart

Fixed weights, sources attached, the formula

Capability(30%)87

Value for Money(15%)92

Security & Compliance(15%)68

Integrations & Ecosystem(15%)85

Maturity & Reliability(10%)78

Momentum(15%)90

Best for

◆Developers wanting low-cost, self-hostable open-weight LLMs for coding and agentic workflows
◆Enterprises needing multilingual, multimodal models via a single unified API
◆Cost-sensitive production deployments seeking frontier-adjacent performance at a fraction of Western model pricing

Key integrations

Hugging FaceModelScopeAlibaba Cloud Model Studio (DashScope)vLLM / SGLang / OllamaOpenRouter / Together AI

Strengths

＋Aggressive price-to-performance with open-weight Apache 2.0 models that can be self-hosted at zero per-token cost
＋Strong, frequently-updated coding and agentic performance, including high SWE-bench Verified scores
＋Broad model catalogue spanning text, vision, audio, coding and embeddings under one API

Limitations

－Newer flagship tiers (Qwen3.6/3.7-Max) have shifted to closed weights, limiting self-hosting for the most capable models
－Some large models use the more restrictive Tongyi Qianwen License rather than Apache 2.0, with commercial caps tied to MAU thresholds
－Reported leadership departures in the Qwen team raise questions about continuity of the open-weight strategy

Evidence behind this score

Every TIP Score is backed by verifiable claims. Data is a curated snapshot, always confirm current terms with the vendor.

Claim	Source	As of
The entire Qwen3 series (0.6B through 235B-A22B) is Apache 2.0 licensed and available on Hugging Face, so it can be run locally at no per-token cost.	https://www.eesel.ai/blog/qwen-pricing	Jun 2026
Qwen 3.6-27B outperforms the much larger Qwen 3.5 (397B MoE) on agentic coding, scoring 77.2% on SWE-bench Verified.	https://theairankings.com/alibaba/qwen-3-6/	May 2026
Newer flagship models like Qwen 3.7-Max are API-only with no open weights, a departure from the historical open-release pattern.	https://www.yottalabs.ai/post/qwen-3-7-max-release-date-features-open-source-status-and-how-to-access-2026	Jul 2026
Larger models such as Qwen3-235B-A22B use the Tongyi Qianwen License, which restricts commercial use above 100 million monthly active users and imposes redistribution conditions.	https://techjacksolutions.com/ai-tools/qwen/qwen-pricing/	Jul 2026