# Qwen Alternatives 2027: 15 Paid, Free & Open-Source

Source: https://zekaiwork.com/alternatives/qwen/
Prices checked: 2026-11-13 (Zekai Price Ledger)

The best Qwen alternatives in 2027 are Claude (best overall, $20/mo), Gemini (best free plan) and Ollama (best open source, MIT). Qwen: API billed pay-as-you-go per token; no flat monthly plan price. Zekai checked these prices on vendor pages on 13 Nov 2026; 12 more are compared below, including 5 with a free plan and 5 open source.

| Tool | Type | Starting price | Free plan limit | Licence | Best for | Price checked | Links |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen (the tool being replaced) | — | API billed pay-as-you-go per token; no flat monthly plan price. | 1M free tokens per model (Singapore, 90 days) | — | — | 2026-11-13 | [pricing](https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/model-studio/model-pricing) |
| Claude | Free plan + paid | $20/mo | Limited usage every 5 hours and every week | — | Careful writing and agentic coding | 2026-11-12 | [site](https://claude.ai) [pricing](https://claude.com/pricing) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/ai-tools/claude/) |
| Mistral AI | Free plan + paid | $14.99/mo | Limited messages, web searches and coding sessions | — | European provider with chat and API | 2026-11-12 | [site](https://mistral.ai) [pricing](https://mistral.ai/pricing) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/ai-tools/mistral-ai/) |
| ChatGPT | Free plan + paid | $20/mo |  | — | General assistant with API and Codex | 2026-11-12 | [site](https://chatgpt.com) [pricing](https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/pricing) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/ai-tools/chatgpt/) |
| Gemini | Free | Free plan; paid price not published | Free tier on Flash and 2.5 Pro models; Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview not free | — | Free API tier from Google | 2026-11-12 | [site](https://gemini.google.com) [pricing](https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/ai-tools/gemini/) |
| DeepSeek | Free | Free plan; paid price not published | Web and app chat; no limit stated | — | Low-cost open-weight API | 2026-11-12 | [site](https://www.deepseek.com) [pricing](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/ai-tools/deepseek/) |
| Together AI | Paid | Not checked | No free plan | — | Host and fine-tune Qwen and other open models | 2026-11-12 | [site](https://www.together.ai) [pricing](https://www.together.ai/pricing) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/ai-tools/together-ai/) |
| OpenRouter | Free | Free plan; paid price not published | 25+ free models, 4 free providers, 50 requests per day | — | One API across many providers | 2026-11-12 | [site](https://openrouter.ai) [pricing](https://openrouter.ai/pricing) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/ai-tools/openrouter/) |
| Kimi (Moonshot AI) | Paid | Not checked | No free plan | — | Long-context open-weight models | 2026-11-12 | [site](https://platform.kimi.ai) [pricing](https://platform.kimi.ai/docs/pricing/chat) |
| GLM (Z.ai) | Free | Free plan; paid price not published | Free models: GLM-4.7-Flash, GLM-4.5-Flash, GLM-4.6V-Flash | — | Chinese API with free Flash models | 2026-11-12 | [site](https://z.ai) [pricing](https://docs.z.ai/guides/overview/pricing) |
| Ollama | Open source | $20/mo (hosted) | No limit (self-hosted) | MIT | Run Qwen models locally | 2026-11-12 | [site](https://ollama.com) [pricing](https://ollama.com/pricing) [code](https://github.com/ollama/ollama) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/free-open-source/ollama/) |
| llamafile | Open source | Free (self-hosted) | No limit (self-hosted) | Apache-2.0 | Single-file local model runner | 2026-11-12 | [site](https://github.com/mozilla-ai/llamafile) [code](https://github.com/mozilla-ai/llamafile) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/free-open-source/llamafile/) |
| Qwen3 open weights | Open source | Free (self-hosted) | No limit (self-hosted) | Apache-2.0 (model weights; repo has no LICENSE file) | Self-hosting Qwen's own Apache-2.0 models | 2026-11-13 | [site](https://qwenlm.github.io) [code](https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen3) |
| llama.cpp | Open source | Free (self-hosted) | No limit (self-hosted) | MIT | Core engine for running GGUF models locally | 2026-11-13 | [site](https://llama.app) [code](https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/free-open-source/llama-cpp/) |
| vLLM | Open source | Free (self-hosted) | No limit (self-hosted) | Apache-2.0 | High-throughput GPU serving of open models | 2026-11-13 | [site](https://vllm.ai) [code](https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/free-open-source/vllm/) |
| LocalAI | Open source | Free (self-hosted) | No limit (self-hosted) | MIT | One OpenAI-compatible server for many model types | 2026-11-13 | [site](https://localai.io) [code](https://github.com/mudler/LocalAI) [Zekai page](https://zekaiwork.com/free-open-source/localai/) |

## How each alternative compares with Qwen

- **Claude** (Free plan + paid, $20/mo, checked 2026-11-12): Closed-weight models only, via a $20 monthly chat plan or an API at $2 input and $10 output per million tokens for Sonnet 5.5; Qwen publishes open weights. Switch if you want a flat monthly chat subscription with Claude Code included and no weights to host. Stay with Qwen if you need downloadable weights, Apache-2.0 models you can fine-tune, or the cheapest Singapore API rates.
- **Mistral AI** (Free plan + paid, $14.99/mo, checked 2026-11-12): Le Chat Pro costs $14.99 a month, and Mistral Large is listed at $0.5 input and $1.5 output per million tokens with 50% batch discounts and OCR billed per 1,000 pages. Switch if you want a European vendor with a $14.99 chat plan plus API credits in one account. Stay with Qwen if you want the Qwen3.8 open weights in sizes from 0.8B to 2.4T parameters on Hugging Face.
- **ChatGPT** (Free plan + paid, $20/mo, checked 2026-11-12): API list price is $2 input and $10 output per million tokens for gpt-6.1-sol, and $0.10 / $0.50 for gpt-6-luna; no model usage is free on the API pricing page. Switch if you want the biggest consumer assistant with Codex and an API from one vendor. Stay with Qwen if you want Singapore API quotas of 1M free tokens per model or weights you can run yourself.
- **Gemini** (Free, Free plan; paid price not published): The Gemini API has a free tier for Flash and 2.5 Pro models, but free-tier content may be used to improve Google products; Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview is paid at $2.00 / $12.00. Switch if you want a free API tier without the 90-day expiry on Alibaba's 1M-token quota. Stay with Qwen if your prompts must stay out of a vendor's product training, or you need open weights.
- **DeepSeek** (Free, Free plan; paid price not published): Peak and off-peak pricing: deepseek-flash costs $0.30 input and $1.20 output per million tokens at peak and half that off-peak, with a 1M-token context and up to 384K output. Switch if you run batch work in off-peak hours and want the lowest flash-tier output price. Stay with Qwen if you want a wider model range, from 0.8B to 2.4T parameters, and regional pricing choices.
- **Together AI** (Paid, Not checked): Hosts Qwen models itself (Qwen3.7-Max $2.50 / $7.50 per 1M) and lists fine-tuning from $0.34 per million tokens, with dedicated endpoints and GPU clusters for scale. Switch if you want Qwen and other open models fine-tuned or on dedicated endpoints without leaving a US provider. Stay with Qwen if you want the 1M-token free quota on Alibaba Cloud Model Studio or the vendor's own latest releases first.
- **OpenRouter** (Free, Free plan; paid price not published): A router rather than a model maker: 25+ free models and 50 free requests a day on the Free plan, and a 5.5% platform fee on Standard, with BYOK free up to $25,000 of monthly list-price inference. Switch if you want to switch between Qwen, Claude, Gemini and others through one key and failover. Stay with Qwen if you want to pay the model vendor directly and avoid a platform fee.
- **Kimi (Moonshot AI)** (Paid, Not checked): Kimi K3 models have 1,048,576-token context windows and K2 models 262,144; batch calls on kimi-k3 and kimi-k3.1-pro are billed at 60% of standard price. Switch if you need million-token context on a Chinese open-weight lab's API with a 40% batch discount. Stay with Qwen if you want published USD prices and free quota rules you can read before signing up.
- **GLM (Z.ai)** (Free, Free plan; paid price not published): Three models are free on the pricing page (GLM-4.7-Flash, GLM-4.5-Flash, GLM-4.6V-Flash), and GLM-5.3 costs $1.40 input and $4.40 output per million tokens. Switch if you want a no-cost API model for prototypes and a paid flagship at $1.40 input. Stay with Qwen if you want 1M free tokens on newer flagship Qwen models and open weights under Apache-2.0.
- **Ollama** (Open source, $20/mo (hosted), checked 2026-11-12): Runs Qwen models locally for free (library lists qwen3.8 27b, qwen3.5 up to 122b, qwen3-coder 480b); an optional cloud Pro plan is $20 a month or $16.67 billed yearly. Switch if you want Qwen weights running on your own machine with no per-token bill. Stay with Qwen if you want a hosted API with frontier-size Qwen3.8-Max and no GPU or memory to manage.
- **llamafile** (Open source, Free (self-hosted)): Packages a model and llama.cpp into one executable that runs on most operating systems without installation; includes whisperfile for speech-to-text. Switch if you want one portable file that runs a small Qwen model offline with no install step. Stay with Qwen if you need a managed API, a model library with many sizes, or tools for fine-tuning.
- **Qwen3 open weights** (Open source, Free (self-hosted)): Qwen3 weights from 0.6B to 235B-A22B, dense and mixture-of-experts, under Apache 2.0; you download and serve them yourself, so there is no per-token bill but you supply the compute. Switch if you want Qwen models under your own control with no per-token billing and can supply the hardware. Stay with Qwen if you want hosted API access to the newest Qwen models without managing GPUs or model files.
- **llama.cpp** (Open source, Free (self-hosted)): C/C++ inference engine with a built-in OpenAI-compatible server that runs GGUF models, including Qwen, on Apple silicon, NVIDIA, AMD GPUs or CPU alone. Switch if you want the inference engine itself with its own OpenAI-compatible server and will choose hardware settings yourself. Stay with Qwen if you want a hosted API with no model files, builds or drivers to manage.
- **vLLM** (Open source, Free (self-hosted)): A serving engine built around PagedAttention and continuous batching with an OpenAI-compatible server, aimed at throughput for many requests rather than one local chat session. Switch if you will serve Qwen models to many users on your own GPUs and need high throughput. Stay with Qwen if you want per-token API access without buying or driving GPUs.
- **LocalAI** (Open source, Free (self-hosted)): Drop-in OpenAI, Anthropic and ElevenLabs-compatible server that runs LLMs, vision, voice, image and video models on NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Apple silicon, Vulkan or CPU-only. Switch if you want one self-hosted API covering text, voice and image models that can run without a GPU. Stay with Qwen if you want a hosted Qwen API with no local runtime to manage.

## Open-source options in detail

- **Ollama** (https://github.com/ollama/ollama): Licence: MIT; Commercial use: Yes (MIT); each downloaded model carries its own licence.; Runs on: macOS, Windows or Linux; memory needs follow the model size.; Setup: easy: Install the app, then pull a model with one command.; Last commit: 2026-11-12; Last release: 2026-11-10; GitHub stars: 186,883 (2026-11-13)
- **llamafile** (https://github.com/mozilla-ai/llamafile): Licence: Apache-2.0; Commercial use: Yes (Apache-2.0); the bundled model keeps its own licence.; Runs on: Most operating systems; Windows cannot run executables over 4GB.; Setup: easy: Download one file and run it; no install step.; Last commit: 2026-11-05; Last release: 2026-09-15; GitHub stars: 26,632 (2026-11-13)
- **Qwen3 open weights** (https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen3): Licence: Apache-2.0 (model weights; repo has no LICENSE file); Commercial use: Yes; the README says all open-weight models are licensed under Apache 2.0.; Runs on: Sizes from 0.6B to 235B-A22B; memory needs rise with model size.; Setup: hard: Download weights and serve them with vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp or Ollama.; Last commit: 2026-01-09; GitHub stars: 27,729 (2026-11-13)
- **llama.cpp** (https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp): Licence: MIT; Commercial use: Yes (MIT); each GGUF model keeps its own licence.; Runs on: Apple silicon, NVIDIA (CUDA), AMD (HIP) GPUs, or plain CPU.; Setup: easy: Install script or prebuilt binary, then one command serves a model.; Last commit: 2026-11-13; Last release: 2026-11-13; GitHub stars: 134,856 (2026-11-13)
- **vLLM** (https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm): Licence: Apache-2.0; Commercial use: Yes (Apache-2.0); each model keeps its own licence.; Runs on: NVIDIA, AMD or Intel GPUs, or x86, ARM and PowerPC CPUs.; Setup: hard: GPU drivers, model downloads and serving flags to tune.; Last commit: 2026-11-13; Last release: 2026-11-02; GitHub stars: 96,868 (2026-11-13)
- **LocalAI** (https://github.com/mudler/LocalAI): Licence: MIT; Commercial use: Yes (MIT); each model keeps its own licence.; Runs on: Any hardware, including CPU-only; GPU builds for NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Apple.; Setup: moderate: Docker command, then backends and models download on demand.; Last commit: 2026-11-13; Last release: 2026-10-23; GitHub stars: 50,353 (2026-11-13)

## Questions

### What is the best alternative to Qwen in 2027?
Claude is the best overall Qwen alternative on this page ($20/mo). For no cost, Gemini has a free plan (Free tier on Flash and 2.5 Pro models; Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview not free). To self-host, Ollama is open source (MIT).

### Is there a free version of Qwen?
Yes. Qwen has a free plan: 1M free tokens per model (Singapore, 90 days). Paid plans start at API billed pay-as-you-go per token; no flat monthly plan price., checked on 13 Nov 2026.

### Is there a 100% free alternative to Qwen?
Yes. Ollama, llamafile, Qwen3 open weights, llama.cpp, vLLM, LocalAI are open source and free to self-host. Claude, Mistral AI, ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, OpenRouter, GLM (Z.ai) have a free plan with limits, shown in the table.

### How much do Qwen alternatives cost for a team of 5?
If each of 5 people buys the entry paid plan, at the prices Zekai checked on 13 Nov 2026, the monthly cost is Mistral AI $74.95/mo, Claude $100/mo, ChatGPT $100/mo. Team and business plans can cost more per seat. The Zekai Cost Finder on this page recalculates for any team size.

### Which is better, Claude or Qwen?
Closed-weight models only, via a $20 monthly chat plan or an API at $2 input and $10 output per million tokens for Sonnet 5.5; Qwen publishes open weights. Choose Claude if you want a flat monthly chat subscription with Claude Code included and no weights to host. Stay with Qwen if you need downloadable weights, Apache-2.0 models you can fine-tune, or the cheapest Singapore API rates.

### Why are people leaving Qwen?
The documented reasons are: Free API quotas apply only in Singapore, expire 90 days after activation or model release, and are not offered in other regions (7 Nov 2026); The same pricing page lists different prices by region: qwen3.8-max is $2 / $6 per million tokens in Singapore and $1.65 / $4.951 in China (Beijing), and Singapore qwen3.7-plus carries a limited-time 20% discount (7 Nov 2026). Each is sourced in the section above.

### Qwen vs DeepSeek: which is better?
Both publish open weights and low per-token API prices. Qwen offers more sizes and a free Singapore quota; DeepSeek has peak and off-peak pricing and a 1M-token context. Match the model to your task and region.

## Related on Zekai

- [Claude alternatives](https://zekaiwork.com/alternatives/claude/)
- [ChatGPT alternatives](https://zekaiwork.com/alternatives/chatgpt/)
- [Gemini alternatives](https://zekaiwork.com/alternatives/gemini/)
- [DeepSeek alternatives](https://zekaiwork.com/alternatives/deepseek/)
- [OpenRouter alternatives](https://zekaiwork.com/alternatives/openrouter/)
- [LM Studio alternatives](https://zekaiwork.com/alternatives/lm-studio/)
- [AI for Software Development](https://zekaiwork.com/professions/ai-software-development-code-automation/)

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Live table, team cost finder and price alerts: https://zekaiwork.com/alternatives/qwen/