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

DeepSeek-V3.2 vs Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507

DeepSeek-V3.2 scores 58.6 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507's 56.6 (C), and leads in 2 of 5 scored categories. Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 leads on reach, risk and agent interface. 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

DeepSeek-V3.2 C

Best for Teams with an eight-GPU server who want an MIT agent model with broad runtime support, or agents calling it through a hosted provider

Ahead on

  • Capability, 69 against 37
  • Documentation and upkeep, 34 against 26

Watch for

689.5 GB of FP8 files and no smaller build from DeepSeek or a runtime library, far beyond 107.4 GB

Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 C

Best for Agents that want a fast, capable instruct model on one 24 GB GPU or a 32 GB Mac, with a plain licence and long context.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 60
  • Risk, 55 against 50
  • Agent interface, 75 against 60

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 2.8 against 2.3 out of 5

Watch for

No safety results, prompt-injection guidance or security contact

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runDeepSeek-V3.2Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507Edge
Capability35%356937DeepSeek-V3.2 +32
Reach25%256090Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 +30
Risk20%205055Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 +5
Agent interface10%106075Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 +15
Documentation and upkeep10%103426DeepSeek-V3.2 +8
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 58.6/100C 56.6/100

Facts side by side

FactDeepSeek-V3.2Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorDeepSeekAlibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMITApache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2025-12-012025-09-17
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 reviews2.3/5 (4)2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

DeepSeek-V3.2

DeepSeek-V3.2 is an MIT-licensed reasoning model trained for parallel tool calls, with thinking chosen per request, for long agent work. It needs about 690 GB of FP8 files, eight 80 GB GPUs in vLLM's recipe and prompts built from DeepSeek's Python. The main risk is neglect, with no file changes since December 2025 and no safety evaluation.

Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507

A quick general-purpose cousin, with 3.3B of 30.5B parameters active per token, for instruction following, tool calling and long documents without a thinking step. It needs about 21 to 23 GB at 4 bits, and several providers host it. The main risk is neglect, with no file changes in over a year, no answers from Alibaba and no safety results.

Before you call either

DeepSeek-V3.2

  1. Start it with vLLM's recipe, vllm serve deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.2 --tensor-parallel-size 8 --tokenizer-mode deepseek_v32 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser deepseek_v32 --reasoning-parser deepseek_v3
  2. It doesn't fit the 107.4 GB reference machine at any qualifying build, so call DeepInfra (deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.2) or SambaNova (DeepSeek-V3.2) instead
  3. Outside vLLM, build prompts with encoding/encoding_dsv32.py and wrap parse_message_from_completion_text in error handling, since DeepSeek says it handles well-formed output only
  4. Pick thinking or chat with thinking_mode, and read the reasoning from reasoning_content
  5. Send developer messages only for search-agent prompts, the only use DeepSeek gives that role
  6. Use temperature 1.0 and top_p 0.95 and keep prompts within 128K tokens

Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507

  1. Quickest start is ollama run qwen3:30b-instruct, 19 GB. Plain qwen3:30b and qwen3:30b-a3b are the Thinking-2507 edition, not this one
  2. On our reference machine use BF16 with vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 --max-model-len 262144 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser hermes, 61 GB of weights fits the GPU share
  3. Use the hermes parser in vLLM or qwen25 in SGLang, the template emits JSON inside tool_call tags
  4. Don't pass enable_thinking, this edition never thinks and the card says the flag isn't needed
  5. Sampling per the card is temperature 0.7, top_p 0.8, top_k 20 and min_p 0, with presence_penalty up to 2 against repetition
  6. Leave config.json as it is unless you need more than 262,144 tokens, the 1M mode swaps in config_1m.json and runs one sequence at a time
  7. Validate JSON yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, DeepSeek-V3.2 or Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507?

DeepSeek-V3.2 scores 58.6 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507's 56.6 (C), and leads in 2 of 5 scored categories. Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 leads on reach, risk and agent interface.

Other comparisons with DeepSeek-V3.2 or Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507

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