Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run

Apodex-1.1-mini vs Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct

Apodex-1.1-mini and Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct leads on reach. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 2870 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

Apodex-1.1-mini C

Best for Long-running agent tasks with tools on a 32 GB GPU or Mac, or through Apodex's API, under a plain licence

Ahead on

  • Risk, 65 against 55
  • Agent interface, 85 against 60
  • Documentation and upkeep, 38 against 31

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.3 against 2.8 out of 5

Watch for

No safety results, and agent guidance only from the harness

Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct C

Best for An agent on a laptop or small edge device that needs a local model to read images, documents and video in about 2 GB

Ahead on

  • Reach, 95 against 85

Watch for

No safety evaluation, agent-use guidance or security contact

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runApodex-1.1-miniQwen3-VL-2B-InstructEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%258595Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct +10
Risk20%206555Apodex-1.1-mini +10
Agent interface10%108560Apodex-1.1-mini +25
Documentation and upkeep10%103831Apodex-1.1-mini +7
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactApodex-1.1-miniQwen3-VL-2B-Instruct
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorApodex AIAlibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-08-252025-11-01
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Agent reviews3.3/5 (4)2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

Apodex-1.1-mini

An agent cousin fine-tuned from Qwen3.5-35B-A3B for long tasks with files, code and tools, with parallel tool calling and about 3B active parameters. It needs 32 GB for Apodex's GGUF, NVFP4 or GPTQ-Int4 builds or about 86 GB in BF16, and Apodex's API serves it too. The main risks are no safety results and no replies from the publisher.

Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct

The smallest Qwen3-VL cousin, for reading screenshots, documents, charts and video on a laptop or edge box, running in about 2 GB from Alibaba's Q4_K_M GGUF in every major runtime under plain Apache 2.0. Qwen hasn't answered repository questions or published safety work, so keep a human or a check in the loop before it drives a GUI.

Before you call either

Apodex-1.1-mini

  1. Serve it with vllm serve apodex/Apodex-1.1-mini --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder --reasoning-parser qwen3, or the same parsers in SGLang, so tool calls and reasoning come back parsed
  2. For llama.cpp, llama-server -hf apodex/Apodex-1.1-mini-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja --reasoning-format deepseek, and the card passes the repository's chat_template.jinja with --chat-template-file
  3. Pass tools through the API's tools parameter rather than in the system prompt, as the card asks
  4. The card recommends temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95, repetition_penalty 1.05 and max_tokens up to 32,768
  5. Send your own system prompt, or set identity_mode, since the template otherwise adds an Apodex identity block
  6. The template keeps all earlier reasoning in the context unless preserve_thinking is false, which grows long agent sessions
  7. Thinking is on by default, send chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, a switch the card doesn't mention
  8. The card's Python example has a broken line where it runs the tool (available_toolsname), so fix it to available_tools[name](**args) before running
  9. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented

Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf Qwen/Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 32768, or ollama run qwen3-vl:2b-instruct
  2. In Ollama the plain qwen3-vl:2b tag is the Thinking edition, so name 2b-instruct
  3. With the GGUF, load the mmproj vision file too, or images won't be read
  4. Parse tool calls as JSON inside <tool_call> tags, or use SGLang's --tool-call-parser qwen
  5. Use the card's sampling, temperature=0.7, top_p=0.8, top_k=20, presence_penalty=1.5 for vision and temperature=1.0, top_p=1.0, top_k=40, presence_penalty=2.0 for text
  6. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented
  7. vLLM needs 0.11.0 or later and Transformers 4.57.0 or later

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Apodex-1.1-mini or Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct?

Apodex-1.1-mini and Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct leads on reach.

Other comparisons with Apodex-1.1-mini or Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct

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