Qwen 3.6
Qwen 3.6
The open Qwen of the summer, now succeeded by the 3.8 releases.
Updated
The read
Qwen 3.6 shipped as a dense mid-size model and a sparse one that activates only a few billion parameters per token, both Apache-licensed and supported by every serving stack worth using. The 3.8 generation has since replaced it: an Apache-licensed 27B dense model, a fast sparse Flash, and the full 3.8-Max weights. It remains a well-understood, permissively licensed base, which is reason enough for teams already fine-tuning on it.
Where it shines
- Apache licence with no user or revenue conditions
- Sparse variant runs fast on modest hardware
- A huge ecosystem of fine-tunes and adapters
Worth knowing first
- Qwen 3.8 27B is newer and stronger at a similar size
- Behind the frontier on the hardest reasoning tasks
Index score
82.2
Provisional. This score is read from the product's public capability, not from the one-prompt rebuild the fully reviewed entries went through, so treat it as a placing rather than a verdict.
- Rank
- 34 of 73
- Builds
- LLMs
- Category
- Open weights
- Output
- Apache-licensed weights, several sizes
- Pricing
- Free tier
- Best for
- Existing fine-tunes and on-premise deployments built on it
Scores are our own editorial judgement, weighted craft 55, speed 10, control 15 and value 20.
Compare it with
Also worth a look
Full index- 05GLM-5.3 FlashGLM-5.3 FlashProvisionalA fast, MIT-licensed open model that human voters rank beside the big flagships.Open weightsFree tier89.6
- 06Xiaomi MiMo V2.6 ProMiMo V2.6 ProProvisionalThe strongest large open-weights model on the independent index, under MIT, for under a dollar out.Open weightsFree tier89.4
- 07DeepSeek V4.1 FlashDeepSeek V4.1 FlashProvisionalFrontier-adjacent answers for thirty cents per million input tokens, with the weights under MIT.Open weightsFree tier88.3
