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Qwen3.5 397B A17B vs Qwen3.6 Plus

Compare Qwen3.5 397B A17B and Qwen3.6 Plus side-by-side. See how these vision models stack up in Image Captioning, OCR, and Open Prompt.

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QwenQwen3.5 397B A17B
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Qwen3.5 397B A17B vs Qwen3.6 Plus Comparison Table

Evals updated July 24, 2026Pricing updated July 25, 2026

PropertyQwen3.5 397B A17BQwen3.6 Plus
OrganizationQwenQwen
Categoryopenclosed
Modalitymultimodalmultimodal
Release DateFeb 2026Apr 2026
Context Window262K1.0M
Parameters397B
LicenseApache 2.0Proprietary
Pricing per 1M tokens
Input $/1M$0.390$0.325
Output $/1M$2.34$1.95
Vision Tasks
CaptioningDemoDemo
Chart Question Answering
Classification
Document Question Answering
Image Tagging
Multi-Label Classification
Object Detection
OCRDemoDemo
Vision Language
Visual Question AnsweringDemoDemo
Model Features
Foundation Vision
LLMs with Vision Capabilities
Multimodal Vision

Qwen3.5 397B A17B vs Qwen3.6 Plus: Overview

Qwen3.5 397B A17B

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.

Qwen3.6 Plus

Qwen3.6 Plus is a flagship model in Alibaba’s Qwen Plus series, designed for agentic workflows, coding, and multi-step reasoning. It supports a 1 million token context window and up to 65,536 output tokens, with built-in reasoning capabilities. The model is available as a hosted, proprietary API through Alibaba Cloud.

Compared to Qwen3.5, it improves reliability in multi-step execution and frontend code generation, with stronger performance on agentic coding tasks. It also supports document and image understanding, though its vision capabilities are more limited than dedicated Qwen-VL models. Qwen3.6 Plus is part of a broader Qwen ecosystem that includes both closed-source APIs and open-weight models.

Frequently Asked Questions

Qwen3.5 397B A17B is released under Apache 2.0, while Qwen3.6 Plus uses Proprietary. 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.