Open Models

Qwen alternatives

Explore 8 options alongside Qwen (Alibaba), a product in Open Models.

Candidates share an existing guide group, a comparison, or specific tags within the same category. This shortlist is not a ranking or a test result.

DeepSeek

Listed together in guide “Open-source AI models”

Open-weight LLM family and chat assistant from Hangzhou-based DeepSeek, known for strong reasoning models.

Open (open weights/source) MIT (DeepSeek-V3 repository code); DeepSeek Model License (DeepSeek-V3 Base and Chat weights)

Use cases

  • Math, coding, and analytical tasks that need explicit reasoning
  • Self-hosting open-weight models for privacy or cost control
  • Cost-sensitive API integrations

Pricing: The chat assistant is free; the developer API is usage-priced, and open-weight models can be self-hosted without license fees.

Pricing ↗ · Sources

This record was last reviewed on 2026-10-13.

Mistral

Listed together in guide “Open-source AI models”

Family of open-weight large language models from Mistral AI, including the Mistral and Mixtral series.

Open (open weights/source) Apache-2.0 for Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct; other releases differ (Mistral Medium 3.5: Modified MIT; Mistral Large 4: 'Open'; Voxtral TTS: CC BY-NC 4.0)

Use cases

  • Self-hosting efficient open models
  • European deployments with data-residency needs
  • Fine-tuning compact models for specific tasks

Pricing: Open-weight models are free to download; hosted API access and commercial models are usage-priced.

Pricing ↗ · Documentation ↗ · Sources

This record was last reviewed on 2026-10-13.

Baichuan

Listed together in guide “Open-source AI models”

Open-weight bilingual LLM family from Beijing-based Baichuan Intelligence, now focused on medical AI with its Baichuan-M reasoning models.

Open (open weights/source) Baichuan Community License

Use cases

  • Building Chinese-language NLP applications on open weights
  • Research on bilingual large language models
  • Medical AI assistants based on the Baichuan-M series

Pricing: Open-weight Baichuan models are free to download for research, with licensing terms for commercial use; hosted APIs are billed by usage.

Sources

This record was last reviewed on 2026-09-10.

GLM

Listed together in guide “Open-source AI models”

Family of open-weight large language models from Zhipu AI, spanning general, reasoning, and coding-focused variants.

Open (open weights/source) MIT

Use cases

  • Self-hosting a capable open LLM for products
  • Agentic coding via GLM coding plans and APIs
  • Research on bilingual Chinese-English models

Pricing: GLM open weights are free under permissive licenses; Zhipu's hosted APIs and coding subscription plans are paid by usage or monthly fee.

Sources

This record was last reviewed on 2026-09-10.

Llama

Listed together in guide “Open-source AI models”

Open-weight large language model family from Meta, spanning Llama 3 and Llama 4 generations across multiple sizes.

Open (open weights/source) Llama Community License

Use cases

  • Self-hosted assistants and private deployments
  • Fine-tuning for domain-specific applications
  • Research on large language models

Pricing: Llama weights are free to download under the Llama community license; hosted inference is offered by many providers at usage-based prices.

Sources

This record was last reviewed on 2026-09-04.

Yi

Listed together in guide “Open-source AI models”

Open-weight bilingual (English and Chinese) large language model family from 01.AI.

Open (open weights/source) Apache-2.0

Use cases

  • Self-hosting a bilingual chat or writing assistant
  • Fine-tuning on domain data for Chinese-English products
  • Research on open large language models

Pricing: Yi model weights are free to download and use under Apache-2.0; costs come only from the compute used to run or fine-tune them.

Sources

This record was last reviewed on 2026-09-10.

Amazon Nova

Related: shares the task Running models yourself

AWS portfolio of Amazon-built foundation models and services for text, multimodal, speech, custom model building, and UI-automating agents.

Paid

Use cases

  • Cost-sensitive chat, summarization, and multimodal analysis on AWS
  • Building a custom frontier model with Nova Forge
  • Automating production UI workflows with Nova Act agents

Pricing: Amazon Nova is billed through AWS, typically via Amazon Bedrock, with usage-based pricing that varies by model and service.

Pricing ↗ · Documentation ↗ · Sources

This record was last reviewed on 2026-09-04.

Command R

Related: shares the task Running models yourself

Cohere's open-weight LLM family optimized for retrieval-augmented generation and tool use; succeeded by Command A as Cohere's flagship.

Open (open weights/source) CC-BY-NC-4.0

Use cases

  • Enterprise RAG assistants grounded in company documents
  • Building agents that call external tools and APIs
  • Research on open-weight instruction-tuned models

Pricing: Model weights are free for non-commercial research under a CC-BY-NC license; commercial access is via Cohere's usage-priced API and enterprise deployments.

Pricing ↗ · Documentation ↗ · Sources

This record was last reviewed on 2026-10-09.

Related comparisons

Full Qwen profile → · All Open Models products →