What is Qwen Chat?
Qwen Chat is Alibaba's assistant and one of the major open alternatives on the market: its web interface is free with no usage caps, and much of its model family is published under the Apache 2.0 licence, so anyone can download and run them with no royalties. It is especially strong at reasoning, maths and coding.
Pros
- Completely free web chat with no message limits
- Open-weight models under Apache 2.0, free for commercial use
- Very strong at reasoning, maths and code
- Specialised variants (Coder, reasoning, multimodal)
Cons
- The newest models (3.7 series) are API-only, with no open weights
- Chinese company: its data policy raises concerns in corporate settings
- Smaller ecosystem of apps and integrations than ChatGPT
Frequently asked questions
Is Qwen Chat free?
Yes, the web interface is free with no usage caps. You only pay for the Alibaba Cloud API if you integrate it into your own products.
Are its models open source?
Much of the family is, under the Apache 2.0 licence, which allows commercial use with no royalties. The newest 3.7 series models are API-only for now.
Qwen or DeepSeek?
Both are Chinese, free and open. DeepSeek stands out at pure reasoning; Qwen offers more specialised variants and multimodal options.
Alternatives to Qwen Chat
DeepSeek
4.4Free, unlimited AI chatbot with very capable open-weight models.
ChatGPT
4.7The world's most popular AI chatbot, built by OpenAI.
Le Chat (Mistral)
4.3Mistral AI's European chatbot: fast, capable and cheaper than ChatGPT.