Qwen
Qwen is Alibaba's family of AI models, popular among developers for its open-weight releases and also used across Alibaba's own product ecosystem.
Use cases
It's used for general chat, coding, and multilingual tasks, and its open-weight release makes it an option for developers who want to self-host.
Good to know
Running an open-weight model on your own infrastructure takes some technical setup; for casual use, a ready-made chat interface is usually simpler.
Key features
Qwen is a model family developed by the Alibaba Cloud team. It includes text models in several sizes, code-focused variants and models that can understand images. The weights of many models are published under open licenses on platforms such as Hugging Face; license terms vary by model, so read the license of the specific model before use. You can use Qwen through Alibaba's web chat interface, through its cloud API, or by running it locally.
Getting better results
It is known to be strong on multilingual work, especially between Chinese and English; for Turkish output, manually checking terminology and grammar is a good habit. If you want to run it locally, choose the model size to match your computer's memory: small versions can run on a laptop while large ones need a powerful graphics card. For coding, the code-focused variant may suit better than the general-purpose one.
Privacy and alternatives
If you use the hosted service, check the provider's privacy policy for where data is processed and do not type sensitive details. Running the model on your own machine keeps data from leaving it, but setup and updates become your responsibility. For a ready, maintenance-free interface, ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini is more practical.
Who is it for?
Qwen suits developers, researchers and teams on multilingual projects who want to try open-weight models on their own infrastructure. For ordinary users who do not want technical setup, a ready chat app is more comfortable.
Plans and access (checked October 2026)
- Developer: Alibaba Cloud. The model family launched in April 2023 as Tongyi Qianwen and is now known as Qwen.
- The chatbot is available at chat.qwen.ai and in the Qwen app.
- Many Qwen models are open-weight under the Apache 2.0 license; some use Alibaba's own Qwen licenses, and the Max and Plus versions are proprietary.
- Alibaba releases new versions frequently; in 2026 it shipped Qwen3.5, Qwen3.6, Qwen3.7 and Qwen3.8 models.
These details were checked against the sources below on 17 October 2026. Plans and features change often, so confirm them on the official page before you decide.
Sources
Keep exploring
Comparisons and more: All AI tools ยท Ready-made prompts. The information on this page is general; features, plans and prices change often, so check the current details on the official Qwen page.