What Qwen is best at
- The best open-weights quality available today
- Self-hosted production deployments with full control
- Multilingual work — exceptional beyond English
Where it isn’t the answer
Consumer chat — the raw models are for builders; everyday users will prefer a polished app.
Plans & pricing
Open weightsMost of the family free to download
APIAggressively priced hosted access via Alibaba Cloud
The story so far
- 2023First Qwen releases from Alibaba
- 2024–2025Qwen 2.5 becomes the open-source community favorite
- 2026Qwen 3.5 — arguably the strongest open weights available
Questions people actually ask
Is Qwen open source?
Most Qwen models ship as open weights you can download and run; some flagship variants are API-only.
How good is Qwen really?
On open-model leaderboards it consistently sits at or near the top in 2026 — competitive with closed models from a year earlier.
Who should use Qwen?
Builders. If you are self-hosting, fine-tuning, or need top multilingual performance with full control, it is a first-choice base model.