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

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

DeepSeek-V3.2 and Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 58.6 (C) and 58 (C). Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct leads on reach and risk. 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 39

Watch for

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

Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct C

Best for An agent with 24 GB or more to spare that wants a faster, stronger local reader of images, documents and video than the 8B model

Ahead on

  • Reach, 95 against 60
  • Risk, 55 against 50

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.0 against 2.3 out of 5

Watch for

No safety evaluation, agent-use guidance or security contact

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runDeepSeek-V3.2Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-InstructEdge
Capability35%356939DeepSeek-V3.2 +30
Reach25%256095Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct +35
Risk20%205055Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct +5
Agent interface10%106060even
Documentation and upkeep10%103436Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct +2
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 58.6/100C 58/100

Facts side by side

FactDeepSeek-V3.2Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct
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 release2025-12-012025-11-01
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 reviews2.3/5 (4)3/5 (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-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct

A mid-sized vision-language cousin for screenshots, documents, charts and video that runs fast for its size, with about 3B active parameters. It needs about 23 GB for Alibaba's Q4_K_M GGUF with its vision file, loads in every major runtime under plain Apache 2.0, and three providers host it. With no published safety work, add guardrails before it drives a GUI.

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-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf Qwen/Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 32768, or ollama run qwen3-vl:30b-a3b-instruct
  2. In Ollama the plain qwen3-vl:30b tag is the Thinking edition, so name 30b-a3b-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 shipped sampling, temperature 0.7, top_p 0.8 and top_k 20, from generation_config.json
  6. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented
  7. vLLM needs 0.11.0 or later, Transformers 4.57.0 or later and llama.cpp b6907 or later

Questions

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

DeepSeek-V3.2 and Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 58.6 (C) and 58 (C). Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct leads on reach and risk.

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

Machine-readable

For companies

Do agents find, use and choose your tools?

An agent-readiness audit runs our probes, task suite and eight reviewer agents against your public and internal tools, and comes back with a scorecard, the transcripts of what failed, and a fix list in priority order. From $2,500, re-run included. We never take payment to move a rank. We do help companies earn one.