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

Laguna XS 2.1 vs Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct

Laguna XS 2.1 scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct's 56.4 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. 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

Laguna XS 2.1 C

Best for Agents that want a fast local coding model on a 32 GB GPU or Mac, with tool calling and a permissive licence.

Ahead on

  • Agent interface, 85 against 60
  • Documentation and upkeep, 46 against 31

Watch for

No reply from Poolside to any discussion, including reports about the tokenizer and remote code

Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct C

Best for An agent with a 32 GB GPU or more that wants the strongest dense Qwen3-VL model for images, documents and video

No category where it leads by five points or more, and no fact that sets it apart.

Watch for

No safety evaluation, agent-use guidance or security contact

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLaguna XS 2.1Qwen3-VL-32B-InstructEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%258585even
Risk20%205555even
Agent interface10%108560Laguna XS 2.1 +25
Documentation and upkeep10%104631Laguna XS 2.1 +15
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 56.4/100

Facts side by side

FactLaguna XS 2.1Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorPoolsideAlibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceOpenMDW-1.1Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-08-192025-11-01
Terms last updatedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno 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 reviews2.8/5 (4)2.5/5 (4)

Verdicts

Laguna XS 2.1

A small coding and agent cousin with 3B active parameters, so it's quick on modest hardware. Poolside's 4-bit GGUF, also Ollama's default, needs about 24 GB, and every major runtime runs it. The main risks are that nobody at Poolside answers its discussions, there are no safety results, and the SGLang route runs repository code.

Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct

The largest dense Qwen3-VL cousin, for harder work on screenshots, documents, charts and video, needing about 25 GB from Alibaba's Q4_K_M GGUF with its vision file, in every major runtime under plain Apache 2.0. It has no thinking mode or published safety work, and only one provider was found serving it, so plan to run it yourself.

Before you call either

Laguna XS 2.1

  1. Quickest start is ollama run laguna-xs-2.1, 20 GB of files, the same Q4_K_M as Poolside's GGUF
  2. On our reference machine use llama-server -hf poolside/Laguna-XS-2.1-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 131072, from a llama.cpp release with the laguna architecture (b11772 has it), or BF16 with vLLM (66.9 GB)
  3. With vLLM use --tool-call-parser poolside_v1 --reasoning-parser poolside_v1 --enable-auto-tool-choice, on a build with vllm-project/vllm#47311, or --tool-call-parser glm47 on older builds
  4. Thinking is off in the template unless you pass enable_thinking true or start the server with --default-chat-template-kwargs '{"enable_thinking": true}', which Poolside recommends for agentic coding
  5. Pass earlier reasoning back as reasoning_content in the history, since the card says reasoning may stop in later steps if it's dropped
  6. Sampling per the card is temperature 1.0 and top_k 20
  7. The card warns that Ollama on Apple Silicon may return empty output until llama.cpp#25389 ships
  8. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented

Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf Qwen/Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 32768, or ollama run qwen3-vl:32b-instruct
  2. In Ollama the plain qwen3-vl:32b tag is the Thinking edition, so name 32b-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
  8. If you pulled the FP8 build before 22 October 2025, pull it again, since the earlier files were the Thinking edition's

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Laguna XS 2.1 or Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct?

Laguna XS 2.1 scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct's 56.4 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories.

Other comparisons with Laguna XS 2.1 or Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct

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