Qwen3.5 (397B-A17B) vs Qwen 3 Max

Pick two tools from the same category to compare side-by-side.

	Qwen3.5 (397B-A17B) Alibaba's Apache-2.0 open-weight Qwen3.5 flagship MoE with very low active-parameter cost and broad multilingual coverage.	Qwen 3 Max Alibaba's open-weights frontier model; very strong on Chinese + code.
Category	model	model
Vendor type	open source	open source
Pricing	free	free
Strengths	+ Permissive Apache 2.0 license + Only 17B active parameters, enabling comparatively cheap inference + First-class MCP and tool-calling support via Qwen-Agent + 201-language coverage for multilingual agents	+ Open weights + Best-in-class for Chinese-language workloads + Strong on coding benchmarks
Tradeoffs	− Long context beyond 262K requires YaRN extension rather than native support − Flagship commercial Qwen3-Max capabilities are not part of the open release	− Inference infra is the team's problem
Used in stacks	0	0