DeepSeek vs Qwen

DeepSeek

A Chinese AI lab's open-weight models and chat app. Strong at reasoning and coding, with very low API prices and weights that can be run locally.

Qwen

Alibaba's Qwen model family and the free Qwen Chat app. The flagship models (Qwen3.8-Max, Qwen3.7-Plus) are API-only through Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, while many smaller models, such as Qwen3.8-27B, are released as open weights under Apache 2.0.

DeepSeek

• Open-source and can be self-hosted
• Exceptional reasoning and coding performance
• Very low API costs compared to OpenAI

• Web version raises privacy concerns
• Censors politically sensitive topics
• Smaller ecosystem than OpenAI or Anthropic

Qwen

• Wide range of open-weight model sizes under the permissive Apache 2.0 license
• Low API prices, with a 1M-token context on Qwen3.7-Plus
• Free Qwen Chat with no subscription tiers
• Supported almost everywhere open models run (Ollama, Hugging Face, inference hosts)

• The top flagship models are no longer released as open weights
• Hosted API runs on Alibaba Cloud, which may raise data-residency questions
• Fast, confusing release cadence with many overlapping model names
• Some organizations restrict Chinese-developed models for compliance reasons

DeepSeek

• Mathematical and logical reasoning
• Code generation and debugging
• Running a powerful LLM locally for privacy
• Cost-efficient API usage for developers

Qwen

• Self-hosting open-weight models for private or on-prem workloads
• Low-cost API inference for agents and RAG pipelines
• Fine-tuning small open models for a narrow task
• Multilingual chat and translation, especially Chinese and English
• Vision and screen-understanding tasks with the multimodal models