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Qwen 3.5 vs DeepSeek V4

Comprehensive comparison between Alibaba (Qwen)'s Qwen 3.5 and DeepSeek's DeepSeek V4. Compare pricing, performance, features, and user reviews.

qwen vs deepseekqwen 3.5 vs deepseek v4chinese open source ai

Qwen 3.5

Alibaba (Qwen)

Alibaba's flagship open-source MoE model with 397B total parameters (17B active per pass). Apache 2.0 licensed for commercial use. Supports 201 languages with native vision capabilities. Best open-weight model for local deployment.

$0.39/$1.56per M tokens
Details

DeepSeek V4

DeepSeek

DeepSeek's trillion-parameter MoE model with only 32B active parameters. 1M context window, native multimodal (text/image/video), and API pricing at ~1/20th of GPT-5. The fastest adopted open-source model in history, capturing 6% global market share within months.

$0.14/$0.28per M tokens
Details

Specs Comparison

SpecificationQwen 3.5DeepSeek V4
Context Window262K1000K
Max Output32K66K
Input (per 1M tokens)$0.39$0.14
Output (per 1M tokens)$1.56$0.28
Reasoning
Open Source

Scenario Score Comparison

Coding
87
vs
—
Writing
82
vs
—

Qwen 3.5

Pros

  • + Open source (Apache 2.0)
  • + Self-hostable with vLLM
  • + 201 language support
  • + MoE efficiency (17B active)
  • + Cheapest API among frontier-class
  • + Strong vision/multimodal performance

Cons

  • − Weaker on hard coding tasks vs Opus/GPT
  • − Requires significant VRAM for local hosting
  • − Quantization affects complex reasoning
  • − Smaller context than GPT-5.4/Opus 4.6

DeepSeek V4

Pros

  • + 1M token context window
  • + Native multimodal (text/image/video)
  • + Price 1/20th of proprietary models
  • + Open-source & self-hostable
  • + Matches frontier model performance

Cons

  • − Servers in China (latency for overseas users)
  • − Geopolitical supply chain concerns
  • − Self-hosting requires significant hardware

Recommendation

Choose Qwen 3.5 if you:

  • • Need open source (apache 2.0)
  • • Need self-hostable with vllm
  • • Need 201 language support

Choose DeepSeek V4 if you:

  • • Need 1m token context window
  • • Need native multimodal (text/image/video)
  • • Need price 1/20th of proprietary models

Based on scores across 2 scenarios, Qwen 3.5 performs better overall.

Qwen 3.5 Details DeepSeek V4 Details

Get Started with Qwen 3.5

1Visit the provider's website
2Create an account
3Start using the model

Get Started with DeepSeek V4

1Visit the provider's website
2Create an account
3Start using the model

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