What is the best free alternative to Qwen (Alibaba)?
DeepSeek Models is the closest free alternative to Qwen (Alibaba): same Notable Open Models sub-category, and it is free. DeepSeek V4-Pro and V4-Flash open-weight MoE models, MIT-licensed
Best free Qwen (Alibaba) alternatives
Looking for a free alternative to Qwen (Alibaba)? Here are 9 notable open models worth trying — 9 with a free tier. Qwen (Alibaba) itself is free.
| Tool | Qwen (Alibaba) (you searched) | DeepSeek Models | Mistral Open Models (Magistral, Devstral, Voxtral) | OLMo (Ai2) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing | free | free | free | free |
| Best for | Open Qwen3.x family from phone-sized to multi-trillion-parameter MoE, Apache 2.0 | DeepSeek V4-Pro and V4-Flash open-weight MoE models, MIT-licensed | Open-weight Mistral Medium 3.5, Small 4 and Large 3 general models | Only major model family shipping full pretraining data (Dolma), code and intermediate checkpoints, not just weights |
| Visit | Open ↗ | Open ↗ | Open ↗ | Open ↗ |
Qwen (Alibaba) alternatives — straight answers
Are there free Qwen (Alibaba) alternatives?
Yes — 9 of the 9 alternatives listed here are free or freemium: DeepSeek Models, Mistral Open Models (Magistral, Devstral, Voxtral), OLMo (Ai2), Hunyuan (Tencent), Falcon (TII). None of them are paid-only.
Is Qwen (Alibaba) free?
Qwen (Alibaba) is free. There is no paid plan attached to it in the catalog.
How were these Qwen (Alibaba) alternatives chosen?
They are the other tools in Notable Open Models, then the rest of AI Models & Local Execution, ordered free tiers first and capped at 9. There is no sponsorship and no paid placement in that ordering — only the pricing tier decides.
All Qwen (Alibaba) alternatives
Browse Notable Open Models →DeepSeek Models
Notable Open Models
✦ WhyA Qwen (Alibaba) alternative — DeepSeek V4-Pro and V4-Flash open-weight MoE models, MIT-licensed.
- DeepSeek V4-Pro and V4-Flash open-weight MoE models, MIT-licensed
- Very long context with reasoning and non-reasoning modes
- Successors to the V3 and R1 lines
- Free weights plus free web chat
Mistral Open Models (Magistral, Devstral, Voxtral)
Notable Open Models
✦ WhyA Qwen (Alibaba) alternative — Open-weight Mistral Medium 3.5, Small 4 and Large 3 general models.
- Open-weight Mistral Medium 3.5, Small 4 and Large 3 general models
- Devstral for coding agents and Magistral for visible reasoning
- Voxtral open-weights speech models for transcription and voice agents
OLMo (Ai2)
Notable Open Models
✦ WhyA Qwen (Alibaba) alternative — Only major model family shipping full pretraining data (Dolma), code and intermediate checkpoints, not just weights.
- Only major model family shipping full pretraining data (Dolma), code and intermediate checkpoints, not just weights
- Olmo 3 ships Base, Think, and Instruct variants at 7B/32B
- OlmoCore training framework and Open Instruct pipeline are also open source
Hunyuan (Tencent)
Notable Open Models
✦ WhyA Qwen (Alibaba) alternative — Open-weight Hunyuan Hy3 and Hy4-preview flagship text models.
- Open-weight Hunyuan Hy3 and Hy4-preview flagship text models
- Hunyuan3D line for fast image-to-3D generation
- Hy-MT translation models covering dozens of language pairs
Falcon (TII)
Notable Open Models
✦ WhyA Qwen (Alibaba) alternative — Falcon-H1 hybrid Transformer-Mamba family for efficient long-context inference.
- Falcon-H1 hybrid Transformer-Mamba family for efficient long-context inference
- Falcon-H1R small reasoning model with strong math results for its size
- Free commercial use under TII's Falcon license
MiniMax M2 (open weights)
Notable Open Models
✦ WhyA Qwen (Alibaba) alternative — MiniMax's open-weight M-series: M3 multimodal MoE with very long context, plus M2.x agentic-coding checkpoints.
- MiniMax's open-weight M-series: M3 multimodal MoE with very long context, plus M2.x agentic-coding checkpoints
- Distinct from MiniMax's Hailuo video product
- Free weights on Hugging Face
✦ WhyA Qwen (Alibaba) alternative — MiMo-V2.6-Pro (1T parameters) and V2.6-Flash (311B) open-weight reasoning and agent models.
- MiMo-V2.6-Pro (1T parameters) and V2.6-Flash (311B) open-weight reasoning and agent models
- Distilled MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B for single-GPU use
- V2-Flash, V2.5 and V2.5-Pro checkpoints also published
✦ WhyA Qwen (Alibaba) alternative — Step-3.7-Flash open multimodal model with FP8, NVFP4 and GGUF builds.
- Step-3.7-Flash open multimodal model with FP8, NVFP4 and GGUF builds
- Step-3.5-Flash text model widely run locally
- 51 open models incl. audio and image models
✦ WhyA Qwen (Alibaba) alternative — ERNIE-4.5 family including 21B-A3B Thinking and VL-424B-A47B multimodal MoE.
- ERNIE-4.5 family including 21B-A3B Thinking and VL-424B-A47B multimodal MoE
- ERNIE-Image and ERNIE-Image-Turbo 8B text-to-image models
- Unlimited-OCR 3B document model (1.5M+ downloads)