AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Qwen3.5 Small
0.8B-9B native multimodal w/ more intelligence, less compute
Qwen3.5 Small is a series of lightweight language models ranging from 0.8B to 9B parameters that support both text and image inputs. Designed for efficient performance, the smaller variants are optimized for edge… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.
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Qwen3.5▲288The 397B native multimodal agent with 17B active params
Feb 2026 · qwen.ai · its alternatives →
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Qwen3.6-Plus▲139Multimodal AI optimized for real-world coding agents
Apr 2026 · qwen.ai · its alternatives →
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Qwen3.6-35B-A3B▲124The open sparse MoE model for agentic coding
Apr 2026 · qwen.ai · its alternatives →
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Qwen3.6-27B▲120The sweet-spot open dense model for coding agents
Apr 2026 · qwen.ai · its alternatives →
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Qwen3-Coder▲248A powerful open model for agentic coding tasks
2025 · qwenlm.github.io · its alternatives →
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Last week was big for open source LLMs. We got: - Qwen 2.5 VL (72b and 32b) - Gemma-3 (27b) - DeepSeek-v3-0324 And a couple weeks ago we got the new mistral-ocr model. We updated our OCR benchmark to include the new models. We evaluated 1,000 documents for JSON extraction accuracy. Major takeaways: - Qwen 2.5 VL (72b and 32b) are by far the most impressive. Both landed right around 75% accuracy (equivalent to GPT-4o’s performance). Qwen 72b was only 0.4% above 32b. Within the margin of error. - Both Qwen models passed mistral-ocr (72.2%), which is specifically trained for OCR. - Gemma-3…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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The Sweet Spot for Open-Source Multimodal AI
2025 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →
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Qwen's most advanced reasoning model yet
2025 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →
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Qwen3.8-Max▲277Qwen3.8-Max + MCP for coding on your local machine, without paying for Qwen Code. Qwen3.8-Max itself runs in the cloud through Qwen Studio — this setup just gives it access to your local files and terminal through MCP. My take: it is slower than Codex and Claude Code, especially in thinking mode, but it does work well. MCP adds some latency too since there’s an extra layer between the model and your machine. In fast mode, it gets noticeably closer. I wouldn’t put it in the same category as Fable or Opus-5. Personally, I’d place it closer to the next Opus 4.7 level in terms of coding ability.…
Aug 2026 · qwen.ai · its alternatives →
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Qwen-Image-2512▲316This is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Qwen or Alibaba
Jan 2026 · qwen.ai · its alternatives →
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Qwen3.8-Flash-Nextfree tier▲108The open-weight preview of Qwen4
Aug 2026 · qwen.ai · its alternatives →
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Qwen2.5-Max▲59Large language model series developed by Alibaba Cloud
2025 · qwenlm.github.io · its alternatives →
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Llama 4▲422A new era of natively multimodal AI innovation
2025 · developer.meta.com · its alternatives →
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How small can a language model be while still doing something useful? I wanted to find out, and had some spare time over the holidays. Z80-μLM is a character-level language model with 2-bit quantized weights ({-2,-1,0,+1}) that runs on a Z80 with 64KB RAM. The entire thing: inference, weights, chat UI, it all fits in a 40KB .COM file that you can run in a CP/M emulator and hopefully even real hardware! It won't write your emails, but it can be trained to play a stripped down version of 20 Questions, and is sometimes able to maintain the illusion of having simple but terse conversations…
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →