Head-to-Head Comparison
Qwen vs Yi
Which Open Source Model is right for you? See our complete breakdown.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Qwen | Yi |
|---|---|---|
| MegaOne Score | 8/10 | 6/10 |
| Category | Open Source Model | Open Source Model |
| Pricing Model | Freemium | Enterprise |
| Starting Price | $0.45/mo | $199.00/mo |
| Free Tier | Yes | Yes |
| API Available | No | Yes |
| Open Source | No | Yes |
| iOS App | No | No |
| Android App | No | No |
| Chrome Extension | No | No |
| Company | Alibaba Cloud | 01.AI (Beijing Lingyi Wanwu Information Technology Co., Ltd.) |
| Total Funding | $53.0B | $300M |
Visual Comparison
Qwen Yi
About Qwen
Qwen is a family of large language models developed by Alibaba Cloud, offering advanced capabilities in coding, multimodal reasoning, and agentic tasks.
Qwen is a family of large language models developed by Alibaba Cloud, with the latest flagship model being Qwen3.8-Max, released in August 2026. It features a Mixture-of-Experts architecture with 2.4 trillion parameters, a 1-million-token context window, and native multimodality, excelling in coding, research, and agentic workflows. The Qwen3.8-27B model, also released in August 2026, is an open-weight, dense vision-language model suitable for local deployment.
About Yi
01.AI develops open-source large language models and enterprise AI agent platforms, focusing on bilingual capabilities and cost-effectiveness.
01.AI, founded by Kai-Fu Lee, offers the Yi series of open-source large language models, including Yi-1.5, Yi-Coder, and Yi-VL, which are recognized for strong performance in language understanding, reasoning, and coding, particularly in English and Chinese. As of August 2026, the company is transitioning its focus to enterprise-level AI solutions with platforms like TrueNorth (万策) and Wanzhi (万智), while discontinuing its self-serve API platform.
The Verdict
Qwen takes the edge
With a MegaOne score of 8/10 versus 6/10, Qwen edges ahead of Yi in our analysis. However, Yi may still be the better choice depending on your specific use case and budget.
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