Chat / reasoning
Qwen (general)
Best for: Everything from phones to servers
Many sizes; newer versions can switch between fast answers and “thinking”.
AppAPIOpen weights
🇨🇳 China · China
Alibaba (Qwen) models explained
Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen team releases one of the largest families of open-weight models, from tiny models for phones to large cloud models, plus vision, audio, coding and video models.
All model families
Code
Qwen Coder
Best for: Coding assistants and agents
Among the strongest open coding models.
AppAPIOpen weights
Vision-language
Qwen-VL
Best for: Reading images, charts and documents
Understands images and screenshots.
AppAPIOpen weights
Multimodal & speech
Qwen-Omni / Audio
Best for: Voice and audio understanding
Accepts text, images, audio and video.
APIOpen weights
Video generation
Wan
Best for: Open text- and image-to-video
Alibaba’s open video generation models.
AppOpen weights
Model names and versions change often. Check the official documentation for the newest releases.
⚡ Which model should you use?
- Strongest free online: Qwen Chat.
- Local on a laptop: a small Qwen via Ollama.
- Coding locally: Qwen Coder.
Data, privacy and your region
Cloud services from Chinese companies process data under Chinese law and the provider’s privacy policy. Many organisations in the UK, EU and US restrict their use for sensitive data. The open-weight models can instead be run locally or on your own servers, where your data stays under your control.
Frequently asked questions
Is Qwen open source?
Many Qwen models are released with open weights (often Apache 2.0) and can be used commercially; check each model’s licence.