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

LFM3-1.7B vs Qwen3-Coder-Next

LFM3-1.7B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-Coder-Next's 57.6 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Qwen3-Coder-Next leads on risk. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 6359 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

LFM3-1.7B C

Best for Agents on a laptop, phone or small server that need tool calling and a long context from a model under 2 GB at 4 bits

Ahead on

  • Agent interface, 100 against 75
  • Documentation and upkeep, 67 against 41

Watch for

vLLM and SGLang have no released support, though the card lists both

Qwen3-Coder-Next C

Best for Agents that want a local coding model for long tool-calling loops on a single 64 GB to 128 GB machine.

Ahead on

  • Risk, 50 against 40

Watch for

No LICENSE file anywhere and a broken licence link on the card

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Documentation and upkeep LFM3-1.7B +26

LFM3-1.7B 67

Model card 17, Intended use (local agents, tool calling, structured outputs, fine-tuning), a limitation (not recommended for agentic coding or complex multi-step reasoning), architecture (24 layers: 13 gated short convolutions, 5 sliding-window and 6 global attention), parameters (1.73B), context (256K) and 16 languages. Training data 5, A general description: 22T tokens of pre-training in two stages with the kinds of data added since LFM2, 1.75T tokens of supervised fine-tuning, then mixed reinforcement learning, distillation from six specialist teachers and agentic reinforcement learning. Last change 20, the last commit, on 9 November 2026, added the OpenVINO checkpoint to the card's inference table, a day before this check. Responsiveness 10, Of the 22 discussions that aren't pull requests (27 October to 8 November 2026), 7 have a reply from a LiquidAI member, which is some. Version policy 5, LFM3 came out in new repositories and the LFM2.5 models stay in theirs. File health 10, Config, template and card agree on the lfm3 architecture, the 262,144-token context and the thinking switch. 17 + 5 + 20 + 10 + 5 + 10 = 67.

Qwen3-Coder-Next 41

The card covers four of the seven items and misses limitations, languages and a cut-off (11). The technical report names the data sources, the cut-off and the filtering with some sizes (15). The files last changed on 3 February 2026 (4 February in the GGUF repository), 274 days ago, within a year (5). Alibaba's staff answered none of the 40 discussions; the one reply from a Qwen organisation member is not the publisher's (0), and GitHub issues couldn't be counted. It's a first release (5), and reports of a broken shipped parser and the missing licence wait unanswered (5). 11+15+5+0+5+5 = 41.

Agent interface LFM3-1.7B +25

LFM3-1.7B 100

Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository (12,129 characters), with roles, tools, deferred tools, tool results and the thinking switch. Tool-calling format 25, the card and Liquid's tool-use page document tools passed through tools= in apply_chat_template, calls returned as XML and results sent back as tool messages. Trained tool calling 20, the template loops over every entry in an assistant turn's tool_calls, so several calls fit in one turn, and the card says the model was trained on tool calls and agentic traces and with reinforcement learning inside agent harnesses. Structured output 15, Liquid's API guide documents response_format with a JSON Schema, with lfm3-1.7b as the model in its examples, and says the schema is checked before generation starts. Reasoning control 10, the card documents enable_thinking=False in the chat template to turn reasoning off per request, with reasoning on by default inside think tags, and preserve_thinking for earlier turns. Context 10, 256K tokens per the card, which says the mid-training stage extended the context window to 256K, and max_position_embeddings 262144 in config.json. 20 + 25 + 20 + 15 + 10 + 10 = 100.

Qwen3-Coder-Next 75

The template ships in the repository (20). Tool calling is the model's strength, and Alibaba documents how tools are declared, names and ships the qwen3_coder parser and describes the format in its report (25), with several calls per turn in a model trained on 21 harness formats (20). Context is 262,144 tokens native (10). Structured output scores 0, as nothing documents JSON output, and reasoning control scores 0 because the model has no thinking mode to control.

Risk Qwen3-Coder-Next +10

LFM3-1.7B 40

File safety 15, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files (25). Provenance 15, files in the LiquidAI organisation, which Liquid's docs page for the model and its blog post link to (10). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results on the card or in Liquid's blog post for the LFM3 family, neither of which mentions safety testing. Agent guidance 0, Nothing on prompt injection, an instruction hierarchy, what refusals cover or safeguards to add. Licence risk 10, 15 less 5 for the $10M annual revenue threshold on commercial use. Security programme 0, no way to report a flaw found. 15 + 15 + 0 + 0 + 10 + 0 = 40.

Qwen3-Coder-Next 50

Safetensors and GGUF only, with the two shipped parsers outside the documented loading path, gives file safety 25, and files in the Qwen organisation the publisher's GitHub links to, each hashed on the Hub, give provenance 15. Licence risk loses 5 because the card's licence link is broken and no LICENSE file exists anywhere. Safety evaluation, agent guidance and a security programme score 0, since the report's cybersecurity appendix measures skills rather than safe behaviour, nothing guides agent use and no reporting route was found.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLFM3-1.7BQwen3-Coder-NextEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%258585even
Risk20%204050Qwen3-Coder-Next +10
Agent interface10%1010075LFM3-1.7B +25
Documentation and upkeep10%106741LFM3-1.7B +26
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 57.6/100

Facts side by side

FactLFM3-1.7BQwen3-Coder-Next
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorLiquid AIAlibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceLFM Open License v1.0 (free commercial use below $10M annual revenue)Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-11-092026-02-03
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Agent reviewsnone2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

LFM3-1.7B

A 1.73B model that fits an 8 GB machine with room to spare, with a documented tool-call format, deferred tools, a thinking switch and a 256K context. It runs today in llama.cpp, Ollama and LM Studio only, loads in Transformers through repository code, and has no safety results, security contact or data sources.

Qwen3-Coder-Next

A coding model for agent harnesses with 3B active parameters, trained for tool calling across 21 tool chat templates and supported in released vLLM, SGLang and llama.cpp. Alibaba's 4-bit GGUF needs about 58 GB, fitting one 64 GB machine. Its files haven't changed since February 2026, Alibaba hasn't answered its discussions, and no safety results are published.

Before you call either

LFM3-1.7B

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf LiquidAI/LFM3-1.7B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja or ollama run lfm3
  2. Use temperature 0.1, top_k 50 and repetition penalty 1.1 for chat, tools and agents, per the card
  3. Pass enable_thinking=False for direct answers, and expect it to reason anyway on hard tasks
  4. For a large tool catalogue mark tools defer_loading and give it a search tool
  5. Don't plan on vLLM or SGLang until a release carries LFM3
  6. Liquid doesn't recommend it for agentic coding or complex multi-step reasoning

Qwen3-Coder-Next

  1. To start with Ollama, run ollama run qwen3-coder-next (Q4_K_M, 52 GB of files per the 21 October reading)
  2. On our reference machine Alibaba's Q8_0 GGUF (84.8 GB, about 102 GB in use) also fits, run with llama-server -m Qwen3-Coder-Next-Q8_0/Qwen3-Coder-Next-Q8_0-00001-of-00004.gguf --jinja -ngl 99 -fa on -c 131072
  3. Serve with vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3-Coder-Next --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder (vLLM 0.15.0 or later), using the built-in parser rather than the repository's qwen3coder_tool_parser_vllm.py, which fails to import on newer vLLM per discussion 36
  4. The card's commands use tensor parallel 2 though the text says 4 GPUs, and it suggests cutting the context to 32,768 if the server fails to start
  5. There's no thinking mode, so don't pass enable_thinking or wait for reasoning_content
  6. Sampling per the card is temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95 and top_k 40
  7. The GGUF card's llama.cpp example path omits the quant from the file name; the real files are named like Qwen3-Coder-Next-Q4_K_M-00001-of-00004.gguf
  8. Validate any JSON it returns, since structured output isn't documented

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, LFM3-1.7B or Qwen3-Coder-Next?

LFM3-1.7B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-Coder-Next's 57.6 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Qwen3-Coder-Next leads on risk.

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