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Qwen

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by Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba's open-weight family — broad model sizes, strong multilingual and vision coverage.

Free Plan Available Freemium API Available Mobile App
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About Qwen

Qwen is Alibaba Cloud's family of open-weight large language models, released in sizes from a few billion to several hundred billion parameters. The line covers text, vision and code variants, and the weights are published for self-hosting as well as being available through Alibaba Cloud's API.
  • Conversational Chat AI Capabilities
  • Text Generation Content & Media
  • File Uploads Data & Files
  • Public API Developer & Automation
  • Shareable Links Collaboration
  • Data-Retention Controls Security & Compliance

Key Features

AI Capabilities

  • Conversational Chat

    Multi-turn natural-language conversation with follow-up context.

  • Reasoning Mode

    A deliberate "thinking" mode that works through multi-step problems before answering.

  • Multilingual Support

    Excellent Asian languages

    Understands and replies in dozens of languages, including translation between them.

  • Long-Context Understanding

    Handles very long documents and conversations without losing earlier context.

Content & Media

  • Text Generation

    Drafts, rewrites and edits long-form and short-form copy.

  • Image Generation

    Creates original images from a text prompt.

  • Image Understanding

    Vision models

    Reads photos, screenshots, diagrams and handwriting and answers questions about them.

  • Voice Conversation

    Real-time spoken input and natural spoken replies.

  • Audio Transcription

    Turns recorded speech into searchable, summarised text.

Data & Files

  • File Uploads

    Attach files to a conversation for the model to read and work with.

  • Document Analysis

    Summarises, extracts from and answers questions about PDFs, DOCX and slides.

  • Code Execution Sandbox

    Runs code in an isolated sandbox to compute real answers, not just write code.

Qwen Pricing

Prices are set by the vendor and may change.

Popular

Qwen Chat

$0 /month

What's included

  • Free web and mobile assistant
  • Vision, document and audio input
  • Reasoning mode included
  • No credit card required
Start chatting

Open weights

$0

What's included

  • Free download under an open licence
  • Sizes from phone-scale upward
  • Fine-tune on your own data
  • Fully offline operation
Get the weights

Alibaba Cloud API

Per token usage

What's included

  • Low per-million-token rates
  • Vision and audio endpoints
  • Fine-tuning available
  • Enterprise SLAs
View pricing
View full pricing details

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Real-World Use Cases

  • Multilingual work
  • Self-hosting
  • Coding
  • Vision tasks
  • Cost-efficient APIs
  • Asian languages

What is Qwen?

Qwen is the model family from Alibaba Cloud, published largely as open weights. Its distinguishing quality is breadth: text, vision, audio and coding models, across an unusually wide range of sizes from sub-billion-parameter models that run on a phone up to very large ones.

It is particularly strong on Chinese and other Asian languages, where Western models are typically weaker, while remaining competitive in English.

You can use the free Qwen Chat assistant, call the API through Alibaba Cloud, or download the weights and self-host.

Benefits of Qwen

What Qwen brings:

  • A very wide size range — phone-scale to datacentre-scale.
  • Open weights across most of the family.
  • Best-in-class Chinese and strong Asian-language support.
  • Vision and audio models in the same family.
  • Competitive coding performance.
  • Free consumer chat plus a low-cost API.

Who Should Use Qwen?

Qwen suits multilingual and self-hosting use cases.

  • Teams working in Chinese or other Asian languages.
  • Developers self-hosting who need a small model that still performs.
  • Edge and mobile deployments using the compact variants.
  • Cost-sensitive API workloads.
  • Researchers needing open vision-language models.

As with any hosted service under a different jurisdiction, review the terms before sending sensitive data — or self-host.

Pros & Cons

6Pros 4Cons

Pros

6
  • Unusually wide range of model sizes, from phone-scale upward.
  • Open weights across most of the family.
  • Best-in-class Chinese and strong Asian-language support.
  • Vision, audio and coding models in the same family.
  • Competitive coding performance.
  • Free consumer assistant plus a low-cost API.

Cons

4
  • Hosted service falls under Chinese jurisdiction — review terms for sensitive data.
  • Documentation in English is patchier than Western competitors.
  • Smaller Western community and tooling ecosystem.
  • Licence terms vary between models in the family.

What's New

  1. Expanded vision-language models

    Feature

    Stronger document and chart understanding in the open vision releases.

  2. Compact on-device models

    Feature

    Sub-billion-parameter variants targeted at phones and edge hardware.

  3. Qwen Chat voice mode

    Feature

    Spoken conversation added to the consumer assistant.

  4. API price reduction

    Pricing

    Lower per-token rates across the hosted model range.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Qwen free?
The Qwen Chat assistant is free, and most model weights are published openly for free self-hosting. The Alibaba Cloud API is pay-as-you-go at low per-token rates.

How good is Qwen at English?
Competitive with other open models. Its real advantage is Chinese and other Asian languages, where it consistently outperforms Western-trained models.

Can I run Qwen locally?
Yes. The family includes very small models that run on a laptop or even a phone, up through large models needing serious GPU hardware. Ollama and vLLM both support it.

Qwen or Llama?
Llama has the larger Western ecosystem. Qwen offers a wider range of model sizes, better Asian-language performance, and stronger open vision-language models.

Is it safe for confidential data?
The hosted service operates under Chinese jurisdiction. If that conflicts with your compliance requirements, self-host the open weights instead.

Does Qwen handle images?
Yes — the family includes vision-language models that read images and documents, available both openly and through the API.

Tool Information

  • Category AI Models & Platforms
  • PricingFreemium
  • Free PlanYes
  • API AvailableYes
  • Mobile App
  • Language Support20+ Languages
  • Starting Price$0
  • DeveloperAlibaba Cloud
  • Founded2023
  • Websitechat.qwen.ai
  • StatusActive
  • Last UpdatedAug 15, 2026
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Best For

Multilingual workSelf-hostingCodingVision tasksCost-efficient APIsAsian languages

Platforms

Web iOS Android Linux API

Tags

AI ChatbotCoding AssistantLLMFree PlanAPI Available

Languages

Arabic Chinese Dutch English French German Hindi Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Polish Portuguese Russian Spanish Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Vietnamese

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