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Qwen Chat

Alibaba's free open-weight assistant with vision, coding and image tools

4.5
AI Chat & Assistant Free plan Paid from API pay-as-you-go (chat is free) Web App, iOS, Android, API

Qwen Chat is Alibaba’s assistant built on the Qwen model series, one of the most widely used open-weight families in the world. The chat app is free and covers text, vision, coding, web search, image generation and video understanding in one place, with some of the most generous usage limits of any major assistant.

For developers the same models run locally under Apache-2.0 weights or through Alibaba’s DashScope API at aggressive prices, and Qwen’s coding and multimodal variants have become default baselines in open-model benchmarks. If you want a free ChatGPT-class assistant without an account lock-in, Qwen is the strongest candidate.

Key Features

  • Free chat, vision and coding assistant
  • Open-weight models under Apache-2.0
  • Image generation and video understanding
  • Web search built in
  • DashScope API with OpenAI-compatible endpoints
  • Runs locally for privacy-sensitive work

Pros

  • Remarkably capable for a completely free assistant
  • Apache-2.0 weights allow commercial self-hosting
  • Huge context windows on flagship variants

Cons

  • Data stored on Alibaba infrastructure
  • English polish behind GPT-6 and Claude in writing tasks
  • API and chat are billed and documented separately

Our Verdict

The best free ChatGPT alternative in 2026 - open weights, multimodal and generous limits without a paywall.

API

from $0.001 / 1K input tokens
  • Pay-as-you-go
  • OpenAI-compatible
  • All Qwen models
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