Qwen
Alibaba's open-weight LLM family with strong multilingual performance across Chinese and English.
Overview
Qwen (通义千问) is the large language model family developed by Alibaba Cloud. The series has grown to include models ranging from 0.5B to 72B parameters, covering text, vision, audio, and code tasks. Released as open-weight models on Hugging Face, Qwen models have become particularly popular for applications requiring strong Chinese and English bilingual performance.
Qwen2.5 represents a significant quality jump, with the 72B model achieving performance competitive with Llama 3.1 405B on many benchmarks despite being 6x smaller. The Qwen2.5-Coder series achieved top performance on coding benchmarks, and Qwen2-Audio handles speech tasks. The multilingual capability across Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, and other Asian languages makes it the preferred open model for East Asian AI applications.
For the ASEAN region, Qwen's strong performance in Chinese and its availability as free open-weight models makes it attractive for Singaporean and Malaysian developers who need to serve bilingual Chinese-English users. Alibaba Cloud hosts Qwen via its API with competitive pricing.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 8 May 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
Use cases
ASEAN Perspective
Qwen in Southeast Asia
ASEAN-region availability and pricing notes coming soon. Drop the editorial team a note via /contact/ if you can supply local context (Singapore/Malaysia/Indonesia/Thailand/Vietnam).
Qwen is Alibaba's flagship large-language-model family and one of the most important open-weight ecosystems in the world, with Apache-2.0 models spanning sub-1B to large MoE sizes plus a proprietary Qwen-Max line on Alibaba Cloud. Capability is genuinely frontier-adjacent on coding, reasoning and multilingual tasks, and the open weights make it a cornerstone for self-hosted and fine-tuned deployments.
For ASEAN it is notably strong: excellent Chinese plus solid multilingual coverage and competitive API pricing via Model Studio, with regional cloud presence. Caveats are that the very latest Max flagships are now closed-weight and API-only, and some teams will weigh data-governance implications of the Alibaba Cloud route. For open-model builders, Qwen is close to best-in-class value.
Notable facts
- Qwen2.5-72B achieves performance comparable to Llama 3.1 405B on many benchmarks while being 6x smaller and faster to run.
- Alibaba released Qwen models under the Qwen Community Licence, which permits commercial use without royalties for most companies.
- Qwen2-Audio was the first open-weight model capable of understanding speech, music, and environmental sounds with natural language descriptions.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Qwen's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Qwen unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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