Command vs. Qwen

Overview

Command is Cohere's enterprise model family for agents, retrieval-augmented generation, multilingual work, and private deployment. Command A+ is the current open-weight generation.

Cohere develops enterprise language models with an emphasis on retrieval, citations, multilingual applications, tool use, and data sovereignty. Command A+, released in May 2026, is a 218B-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 25B active parameters. It supports text and image input, reasoning, agentic workflows, 48 languages, and private deployment under the Apache 2.0 license.

Initial release: 2021-11-15

Current generation: Command A+

Reference

https://cohere.com/command

Further Reading

• https://cohere.com/blog/command-a-plus

Overview

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.

Initial release: 2023-09-13

Current generation: Qwen 3.8

Reference

https://qwen.ai/

Further Reading

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.16609
• https://huggingface.co/Qwen
• https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.6-35b-a3b