Llama vs Qwen

Meta's Llama and Alibaba's Qwen

Llama is Meta's family of open-weight AI models. Qwen is the model family from Alibaba. Both publish downloadable models on Hugging Face, and both are used widely by developers who want to run AI on their own hardware. But the families have taken different paths since 2025: Meta's newest Llama release is still Llama 4 from April 2025, while Qwen has kept releasing new generations, some with open weights and some only as hosted services.

This page compares them as of October 2026. Our site runs Llama models only; Qwen models are not available in our chat.

Llama vs Qwen at a glance

Prices are OpenRouter list price, Oct 2026.

Open models: Llama 4 vs Qwen3.6

Qwen's newest open-weight models are Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and Qwen3.6-27B, published in April 2026 under the Apache 2.0 license. The Qwen3.6-27B model card describes a 27-billion-parameter language model with a vision encoder, a native context of 262,144 tokens that can be extended to about one million, and a focus on coding and agent tasks. The card's examples include image and video input. By default the model thinks before it answers, and developers can switch that off for direct replies.

Llama 4 Scout and Maverick are mixture-of-experts models with 17 billion active parameters each and 109 billion and 400 billion in total. They read text and images, support 12 languages officially, and have training data up to August 2024. They are a year older than Qwen3.6 and do not have a thinking mode.

The practical difference is size. Qwen3.6-27B is a much smaller download than Llama 4 Scout, so it fits more ordinary hardware, and it is newer. Llama 4 has more total capacity, especially Maverick, but needs serious hardware to run yourself.

Hosted models: Qwen3.7

Alibaba's newest Qwen3.7 models are offered through APIs. On OpenRouter, Qwen3.7 Max is the flagship for text and agent work, Qwen3.7 Plus adds image input at a lower price, and Qwen3.7 Flash is a low-cost model that accepts text, images and video. All three are listed with a context window of 1,000,000 tokens. We did not find downloadable weights for Qwen3.7. Meta has no newer hosted Llama to compare them with: its own Llama API preview closed in July 2026, and its newer models are called Muse, which are not in our chat either.

Licensing

Apache 2.0, used for the Qwen3.6 open models, is a standard open-source license that allows commercial use with few conditions beyond keeping notices. The Llama 4 Community License also allows commercial use, but adds the acceptable use policy, "Built with Llama" attribution, a naming rule for fine-tuned models, the 700 million monthly active user threshold and an EU restriction for multimodal models. See our plain-language license guide. For companies that want minimal legal overhead, Qwen's open models are simpler.

Languages

Llama 4 officially supports 12 languages: Arabic, English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai and Vietnamese. Qwen is also used in many languages. Whatever your language, the most reliable check is simple: give both models the same few real tasks in that language and compare the answers. Our chat lets you do that with Llama for free.

Cost

For hosted use, Qwen3.7 Flash at $0.03 input and $0.13 output per million tokens is among the cheapest capable models listed. Llama 4 Scout at $0.10 and $0.30 and Maverick at $0.1875 and $0.6525 sit between Qwen3.7 Flash and Qwen3.7 Plus, which is listed at $0.32 and $1.28 (OpenRouter list price, Oct 2026). Thinking modes add extra tokens to each answer, which affects real costs. Running either family's open models on your own hardware has no per-token cost.

How to decide in practice

Pick a few tasks you really need and run them through both families. If you plan to self-host, compare Qwen3.6-27B with Llama 4 Scout on your hardware and note the memory each needs. If you will use an API, compare Llama 4 with Qwen3.7 Flash and Plus on quality and cost per answer, remembering that thinking modes produce extra tokens. Check the license against how you plan to ship your product.

Choose Llama if…

• you want quick, direct answers without a thinking phase;
• you need a model with Meta's long track record in tools such as Ollama and LM Studio;
• you work in one of Llama 4's 12 supported languages;
• you want to chat for free online right now, which you can do here.

Try Llama 4 Maverick in our chat

Choose Qwen if…

• you want a newer open-weight model under the Apache 2.0 license;
• you need a smaller model that still reads images, or one that handles video;
• you want a thinking mode for harder problems;
• you want very low API prices with Qwen3.7 Flash.

Also compare Llama vs DeepSeek and Llama vs Mistral, or learn more about Llama 4 Scout.

FAQ

Is Qwen open source?

The Qwen3.6 open models use Apache 2.0. The newer Qwen3.7 models are offered through APIs, and we found no downloadable weights for them.

Which is newer, Llama or Qwen?

Qwen. Its open Qwen3.6 models are from April 2026 and its hosted Qwen3.7 models from mid-2026, while Llama 4 is from April 2025.

Can I use Qwen in the Llama.Online chat?

No. Our chat runs only Llama models. Qwen is not available here.

Which runs better on my own computer?

Qwen3.6-27B is much smaller than Llama 4 Scout, so it suits more machines. Among Llama models, Llama 3.1 8B is the easy local choice.