Qwen 2.5 / Qwen 3
Open-weight LLM family by Alibaba with strong multilingual and coding abilities.
About
Qwen is Alibaba Cloud's open-weight large language model family. Qwen 2.5 spans dense models from 0.5B to 72B parameters with strong multilingual coverage and capable coding and math performance. Qwen 3 continues the line with dense variants from 0.6B to 32B plus Mixture-of-Experts models at 30B-A3B and 235B-A22B, and introduces hybrid reasoning: the models switch between a thinking mode that produces extended reasoning chains for hard math, coding, and science problems and a non-thinking mode for fast general-purpose chat. Recent releases support context windows of 256K tokens, expandable to 1 million, cover more than 100 languages, and handle tool use and agent workflows. Weights are published on Hugging Face and ModelScope under the Apache 2.0 license, making Qwen a common base for community fine-tunes. Researchers, developers, and enterprises use the models for multilingual assistants, coding tools, and reasoning-heavy applications.
Should you use Qwen 2.5 / Qwen 3?
Pick it when
Pick this as a default Apache-2.0 base when you need one family spanning 0.5B to 235B MoE, switching between thinking and fast modes, covering 100+ languages, with a deep pool of community fine-tunes and quantized builds.
Look elsewhere when
Skip it if you need image input from the same weights, where Qwen-VL or Qwen3.8's 27B fit, or a dedicated code model, where Qwen-Coder is tuned for completion and repair. For fully open training data, OLMo is the pick.
Alternatives to Qwen 2.5 / Qwen 3
- Qwen3.8
Newer generation: its Apache-2.0 27B adds image and video input, while the 2.4T flagship moves to a custom license and cluster hardware.
- Llama 3.1
Similar size ladder up to 405B with 128K context and tool calling, but under the Llama 3.1 Community license instead of Apache-2.0.
- Gemma 3
Comparable single-GPU sizes with image input built in, under the Gemma license and with fewer languages covered.
- Qwen-Coder
Alibaba's code-specialized sibling for completion and repair, a better fit for IDE tools and coding agents than the general models.
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Details
- Category
- Large Language Models (LLMs)
- Price
- Free
- Platform
- Local/Desktop
- Difficulty
- Intermediate (3/5)
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Minimum VRAM
- 8 GB
- Added
- Apr 3, 2026
Tags
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