Qwen VL Max vs Qwen3.5 397B A17B
Compare Qwen VL Max and Qwen3.5 397B A17B side-by-side. See how these vision models stack up in Image Captioning, OCR, and Open Prompt.
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Qwen VL Max vs Qwen3.5 397B A17B Comparison Table
Evals updated July 10, 2026Pricing updated July 20, 2026
| Property | Qwen VL Max | Qwen3.5 397B A17B |
|---|---|---|
| Organization | Qwen | Qwen |
| Category | closed | open |
| Modality | multimodal | multimodal |
| Release Date | Feb 2025 | Feb 2026 |
| Context Window | 131K | 262K |
| Parameters | 397B | |
| License | Proprietary | Apache 2.0 |
| Pricing per 1M tokens | ||
| Input $/1M | $0.390 | |
| Output $/1M | $2.34 | |
| Vision Tasks | ||
| Captioning | Demo | Demo |
| Object Detection | ||
| OCR | Demo | Demo |
| Vision Language | ||
| Visual Question Answering | Demo | Demo |
| Model Features | ||
| LLMs with Vision Capabilities | ||
| Multimodal Vision | ||
Qwen VL Max vs Qwen3.5 397B A17B: Overview
Qwen-VL-Max is a proprietary vision-language model developed by Alibaba’s QwenLM team. Released on February 1, 2025, it is the flagship offering in the Qwen-VL family and sits above the VL-Plus tier in capability.
The model supports text and image inputs and provides a context window of up to 131,072 tokens (with a maximum input size of 129,024 tokens), according to Alibaba Cloud Model Studio. While the parameter count for VL-Max has not been publicly disclosed, the broader Qwen2.5-VL series includes open-weight models scaling up to 72B parameters.
Qwen-VL-Max is optimized for advanced multimodal applications such as document parsing, visual reasoning, multilingual analysis, and structured data extraction. Unlike the open Qwen2.5-VL variants, VL-Max is not available as open weights.
Qwen3.5-397B-A17B is a 397B-parameter (17B active) open-weight multimodal model developed by Alibaba’s Qwen team, released on 2026-02-16 under Apache-2.0. It supports text and image inputs with text outputs, combining a sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture with Gated Delta Networks for efficient scaling. The model provides native vision-language reasoning and a large ~262K token context window, extendable to ~1M tokens.
As the first open-weight release in the Qwen3.5 family, it positions itself as a high-capacity, long-context alternative in the large vision-language space, balancing scale and efficiency via sparse activation. It is designed for advanced reasoning, coding, agent workflows, and multimodal understanding tasks.
Frequently Asked Questions
Qwen VL Max is released under Proprietary, while Qwen3.5 397B A17B uses Apache 2.0. Licensing often matters more than raw accuracy for commercial deployments, so check the terms against how you plan to ship.
Yes. The comparison demo on this page runs both models on the same image side by side for image captioning and OCR in the free Roboflow Playground. You can try it instantly, and a free account unlocks unlimited runs.