Alibaba

Qwen3 Coder 480B

5.1/10
Maker
Alibaba
Origin
China
Released
Jul 2025
Category
Coding & Agentic

Strengths & weaknesses

  • Open-weight performance within striking distance of proprietary leaders
  • Free to self-host, appealing for cost-sensitive or air-gapped teams
  • Requires serious infrastructure to run at full size
  • Tooling and IDE integrations are less mature than Copilot, Cursor, or Codex

Evaluation

100% of weight measured

Scored on Qwen3 Coder 480B A35B · sources as of Sep 19, 2026

w = weight, each criterion’s share of the overall score. Missing marks don’t count for or against. How scoring works

Enterprise fit

Highest-ROI use cases

Where Qwen3 Coder 480B fits inside a company, ranked by the strength of published ROI evidence for each use case, then by its independent rating for the work.

All 100 enterprise use cases →
  1. 01
    Software engineeringControlled trial
    IT & engineering
    • ▸ Rated #4 of 4 directory models on LMArena WebDev, the closest independent rating for this work
    • ▸ Built for this kind of work (Coding & Agentic)
  2. 02
    Agentic workflow automationEmerging
    Cross-functional operations
    • ▸ Built for this kind of work (Coding & Agentic)

More in Coding & Agentic

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OpenAI

GPT-5.3 Codex

  • Excellent terminal automation, git operations, and CI/CD debugging
  • Far more token-efficient than reasoning-heavy rivals on routine tasks
  • Needs detailed, unambiguous instructions; struggles with vague requests
  • Smaller context window than some rivals, a constraint on huge monorepos
Anthropic

Claude Opus 4.6 (Claude Code)

8.0/10
  • Strong at inferring intent from vague prompts and architectural context
  • 1M-token context supports coherent multi-file, cross-repo refactors
  • Can use many more tokens than leaner coding models on routine work
  • Narrates its reasoning at length, which slows down quick tasks
Cursor

Cursor Composer

  • Tight, real-time feedback loop; you see and steer every change
  • Affordable flat-rate pricing for all-day assistance
  • Needs a developer actively driving; not built for unattended runs
  • Background and async agent mode is still early and limited
MiniMax

MiniMax M2.1

  • Low-cost alternative that holds up reasonably on coding benchmarks
  • Good option for parallel, high-volume exploratory tasks
  • Clearly behind the frontier coding leaders on hard problems
  • Smaller ecosystem and community support than bigger rivals