Qwen in 2026: Alibaba's LLM Family Explained

Qwen (pronounced "chwen") is Alibaba Cloud's family of large language models, released as open-source under various licenses. In 2026, Qwen has become one of the strongest open-source LLM families — competitive with Llama 3 and often outperforming it on specific tasks.

The Qwen model family

Why Qwen stands out

Qwen2.5-72B consistently ranks near the top of open-source LLM leaderboards. Key strengths:

• Long context — native 128K token context window across the 72B model
• Multilingual — strong performance in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and European languages, not just English
• Coding — Qwen2.5-Coder-32B is one of the best local coding models available
• Math — Qwen2.5-Math beats most models its size on math benchmarks
• Apache 2.0 — commercial use allowed without restrictions

Qwen vs Llama 3 vs Mistral

How to run Qwen locally

# Via Ollama
ollama pull qwen2.5          # 7B default
ollama pull qwen2.5:72b      # full 72B (requires ~45GB RAM)
ollama pull qwen2.5-coder    # 7B coding variant
ollama pull qwen2.5-coder:32b  # best local coding model

ollama run qwen2.5

Qwen via API

Alibaba Cloud offers Qwen models through its DashScope API. Pricing is competitive with DeepSeek — significantly cheaper than OpenAI or Anthropic for comparable capability:

• Qwen2.5-72B: ~$0.40/1M input tokens, ~$1.20/1M output tokens
• Qwen2.5-7B: ~$0.05/1M input tokens, ~$0.10/1M output tokens