Kimi
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Qwen
Alibaba's free AI assistant, backed by the open-weight Qwen model family
Free plan Free trial Claimed API Self-hosted Mobile app
Toolglade’s take
One of the strongest free AI assistants available, and the open-weight models make Qwen a rare pick for teams that want to self-host without licensing headaches. The trade-off is Alibaba's ecosystem and China-based governance, which some enterprises will need to weigh.
About Qwen
Qwen is Alibaba's AI assistant and open-weight LLM family. The chat app at chat.qwen.ai is free and multimodal, handling code, images, documents, and web search in 100+ languages, while developers can self-host the Apache 2.0 models or pay per token through Alibaba Cloud. It stands out for combining a fully free consumer product with genuinely open, commercially usable model weights.
Qwen (pronounced "chwen," short for Tongyi Qianwen) is the large-language-model family built by Alibaba's Qwen team, plus the consumer chat product that sits on top of it. The free web and mobile chat app lets anyone generate and debug code, analyze images and documents, reason through math, search the web, and run multi-step agent workflows without a subscription. Users can switch between specialized variants such as Qwen-VL for vision and Qwen-Coder for programming. What sets Qwen apart is its open-weight strategy: most models (typically those under ~35B parameters) ship under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, so teams can download them from Hugging Face or ModelScope, fine-tune them, and self-host for commercial use with no license fee. For those who prefer a managed service, the same models are billed per token through Alibaba Cloud Model Studio (formerly DashScope), spanning budget Flash tiers up to the flagship Qwen-Max.
TL;DR
Qwen is Alibaba's AI assistant and open-weight LLM family, accessible free at chat.qwen.ai. The chat app is multimodal and multilingual, handling code, images, PDFs, and web search with no subscription. Developers can self-host most models for free under Apache 2.0 or call them per token via Alibaba Cloud Model Studio. It's one of the most cost-effective and openly licensed AI options in 2026.
Company overview
Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen) is developed by the Qwen team at Alibaba, one of the world's largest technology and cloud companies. The models originated as Alibaba Cloud's proprietary foundation models and have since become a leading open-weight family, with releases that have topped download charts on Hugging Face and ModelScope. Alibaba positions Qwen as both a consumer assistant and a developer platform, monetizing primarily through Alibaba Cloud API usage while distributing the underlying model weights openly to drive adoption.
Because Qwen is a product line within Alibaba rather than a standalone company, it benefits from Alibaba's cloud infrastructure, research resources, and global reach, but it also inherits the governance and data-residency considerations that come with a China-headquartered vendor.
Product features
Qwen Chat offers free, unlimited-for-most-tasks access to multimodal AI: it accepts text, images, documents, and audio, and produces text, code, and images. Users can switch between specialized variants such as Qwen-VL for vision, Qwen-Coder for programming, and Qwen-Math for reasoning, and can enable real-time web search and agentic tool use for multi-step workflows. Support spans well over 100 languages.
For builders, the same models are available two ways: as downloadable open weights (mostly Apache 2.0) for self-hosting via Hugging Face, ModelScope, or Ollama, and as a managed, per-token API through Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, spanning budget Flash tiers up to the flagship Qwen-Max. This dual model gives teams a clear path from free experimentation to production at low cost.
Target market
Qwen targets developers, startups, researchers, and cost-sensitive teams worldwide who want a capable AI assistant without subscription fees, as well as organizations that need to self-host an open LLM for privacy, customization, or cost reasons. Its free multilingual chat also appeals to a broad global consumer audience, particularly across Asia. It is less oriented toward large regulated enterprises with strict data-sovereignty requirements.
Buyer personas
End users
Developers, students, researchers, and everyday users who use the free Qwen Chat app for coding help, writing, translation, and image/document analysis in many languages.
Buyers
Engineering leads, CTOs, and technical founders who choose Qwen's API or self-hosted open weights to power products cost-effectively.
Key influencers
AI/ML engineers, open-source community members, and technical bloggers who benchmark and recommend open-weight models like Qwen.
Ideal customer profile
A cost-conscious, technically capable team or developer that wants strong multimodal and coding performance with the flexibility to either self-host free open-weight models under Apache 2.0 or scale via low-cost Alibaba Cloud API usage, and that is comfortable with an Alibaba-governed ecosystem.
Funding & performance
Qwen is a product line of Alibaba and is not separately funded or independently disclosed. It is backed by Alibaba Group's resources and monetized primarily through Alibaba Cloud.
Pros & cons
Pros
- Chat app is fully free with no request limits on most tasks
- Open weights under Apache 2.0 allow commercial self-hosting
- Strong multimodal support (text, image, document, audio)
- Specialized variants for coding, vision, and math
- Very competitive, low API token pricing
- Supports 100+ languages
Cons
- Owned and governed by Alibaba, a concern for some enterprises
- Data residency and privacy questions for regulated industries
- No built-in team collaboration or workspace features
- Largest flagship models are not always open-weight
- Rapid version churn can make model selection confusing
Pricing plans
Free (chat)
$0 / month
- Full access to Qwen Chat on web and mobile
- No subscription or credit card required
- Text, image, PDF, and document analysis
- Code generation and debugging
- Real-time web search and agent workflows
- 100+ languages supported
Open weights (self-hosted)
$0
- Download models from Hugging Face and ModelScope
- Apache 2.0 license on most models under ~35B params
- Commercial use, fine-tuning, and redistribution allowed
- No royalty or per-token fee when self-hosted
API (Alibaba Cloud Model Studio)
Usage-based
- Qwen-Flash from ~$0.03 / $0.13 per 1M input/output tokens
- Qwen-Plus mid-tier around $0.40 / $1.20 per 1M tokens
- Qwen-Max flagship roughly $1.25-$2.00 / $3.75-$6.00 per 1M tokens
- Free quota (1M tokens per eligible model, 90 days) on the International endpoint
- China Mainland endpoint priced 60-70% cheaper than International
Key features
API
Mobile app
Self-hosted
Multi-language
Integrations
Hugging Face, ModelScope, Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, Ollama
Input types
text, image, document, audio
Output types
text, code, image
Best For
Developers and coding tasks, Multilingual chat and translation, Self-hosting open models, Document and image analysis
Compare key features
View all alternatives →Feature
Qwen
Kimi
Character.AI
Pricing
Freemium
Freemium
Freemium
Free plan
Yes
Yes
Yes
Free trial
Yes
No
No
API
Yes
Yes
No
Self-hosted
Yes
Yes
No
Frequently asked questions
Is Qwen free?+
Yes. The Qwen Chat app at chat.qwen.ai is free to use on web and mobile with no subscription or credit card, and most tasks have no request limits. On top of that, most Qwen models are released as open weights you can download and run yourself at no cost. You only pay when you use the managed API through Alibaba Cloud, which is billed per token.
How does Qwen compare to ChatGPT and DeepSeek?+
Qwen's free chat app is broadly comparable to ChatGPT's free tier for coding, multilingual chat, and multimodal tasks, and its API is far cheaper. Like DeepSeek, Qwen is a China-based model family with strong open-weight releases, but Qwen offers a wider range of specialized variants (coding, vision, math) and more permissive Apache 2.0 licensing on many models. ChatGPT still leads on ecosystem, integrations, and enterprise tooling.
What are the best Qwen alternatives?+
The closest alternatives are DeepSeek, Meta's Llama models, Mistral, and Google's Gemma for open weights, plus ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Anthropic's Claude for hosted assistants. For self-hosting specifically, Llama, Mistral, and DeepSeek are the most common comparisons.
Is Qwen open source?+
Qwen is open-weight rather than fully open-source in the classic sense: Alibaba releases the trained model weights, most of them under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, which allows commercial use, fine-tuning, and redistribution. Models under roughly 35B parameters typically ship under Apache 2.0, though a few of the very largest flagship models use more restrictive terms, so it's worth checking the license before deploying.
How much does the Qwen API cost?+
Qwen API pricing is usage-based per million tokens through Alibaba Cloud Model Studio. The budget Qwen-Flash tier starts around $0.03 input / $0.13 output per million tokens, Qwen-Plus is roughly $0.40 / $1.20, and the flagship Qwen-Max is about $1.25-$2.00 input and $3.75-$6.00 output. New accounts get a free 1M-token quota per model for 90 days, and the China Mainland endpoint is significantly cheaper than the International one.
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