Get started
LLM Index

DeepSeek vs. Qwen

A side-by-side comparison of release history, capabilities, licensing and model sizes.

Attribute DeepSeek Qwen
Developer DeepSeek Alibaba Cloud
Current generation DeepSeek V4 Qwen 3.8
Initial release 2023-11-29 2023-09-13
Instruct tuned Yes Yes
Coding Yes Yes
Finetuning Yes Yes
Open source Yes Yes
License MIT Mixed; Apache 2.0 open weights and hosted previews
Model sizes 284B (13B active), 1.6T (49B active) Undisclosed for Qwen 3.8 preview
Links

DeepSeek

DeepSeek develops open-weight mixture-of-experts models for reasoning, coding, agents, and efficient long-context inference. DeepSeek V4 is the current generation.

DeepSeek began releasing language models in 2023 with DeepSeek Coder, then gained broad adoption with DeepSeek V3 and the R1 reasoning model in 2024 and 2025. DeepSeek V4, released in April 2026, includes a 284B-parameter Flash model with 13B active parameters and a 1.6T-parameter Pro model with 49B active parameters. Both support one-million-token context windows and are released with open weights under the MIT license.

Further reading

Qwen

Qwen is Alibaba's broad family of open and hosted models for reasoning, coding, multimodal understanding, and agents. Qwen 3.8 Max Preview is the current generation.

Qwen, formerly Tongyi Qianwen, is a family of language and multimodal models developed by Alibaba. It includes general-purpose, coding, vision-language, audio, embedding, and reasoning variants. Qwen 3.8 Max Preview is the current hosted flagship, with support for multimodal and agentic workflows. Earlier Qwen generations, including Qwen 3.6 checkpoints, remain available as Apache 2.0 open weights; availability and licensing should therefore be checked per model.

Further reading

Compare other models

Other DeepSeek comparisons

Other Qwen comparisons