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

LFM3-Omni-2B vs Qwen3-Coder-Next

LFM3-Omni-2B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-Coder-Next's 57.6 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. Qwen3-Coder-Next 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 4969 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

LFM3-Omni-2B C

Best for Voice and camera agents on a laptop or phone that want one small model for hearing, seeing, speaking and calling tools

Ahead on

  • Documentation and upkeep, 49 against 41

Watch for

Only llama.cpp and Ollama run it in a release

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

  • Reach, 85 against 80
  • Risk, 50 against 40
  • Agent interface, 75 against 70

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.

Risk Qwen3-Coder-Next +10

LFM3-Omni-2B 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.

Documentation and upkeep LFM3-Omni-2B +8

LFM3-Omni-2B 49

Model card 14, Intended use (one on-device model in place of separate speech recognition, vision, language and speech models), architecture, parameters (2.17B), context (32K) and the text and speech languages. Training data 5, the card has no training section. Last change 20, the last commit, on 3 November 2026, changed the card's navigation icons, seven days before this check, and the one before it, on 28 October, documented video frame rate and frame limits. Responsiveness 0, none of the 12 discussions that aren't pull requests (27 October to 9 November 2026) has a reply from a LiquidAI member. Version policy 5, LFM3 came out in new repositories and the LFM2.5 models stay in theirs. File health 5, the card gives a 32K context while config.json gives the language model 128,000 positions and Liquid's API lists 128,000 for the hosted model, so the card and the files don't agree on context. 14 + 5 + 20 + 0 + 5 + 5 = 49.

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.

Reach Qwen3-Coder-Next +5

LFM3-Omni-2B 80

Memory 30, Liquid's Q4_K_M GGUF is 1.10 GB with its 0.29 GB projector file, and 1.39 GB × 1.2 = 1.7 GB, which fits 8 GB, well inside the 16 GB line. Runtimes 10, Released llama.cpp has the lfm3 architecture with the LFM3 vision and audio projectors and speech output (src/models/lfm3.cpp and tools/mtmd at b12242, with a realtime client example), and Ollama's library has an lfm3-omni entry. Builds 15, Liquid's GGUF repository holds Q4_0, Q4_K_M, Q8_0, F16 and BF16 files, and Liquid publishes 4-bit and 8-bit MLX builds and an ONNX repository, all in the LiquidAI organisation. Terms 10, the LFM Open License v1.0, a custom licence that lets anyone use it commercially for free below a threshold of $10M annual revenue. Download 10, the Hub API reports gated false for the model and its GGUF, MLX and ONNX repositories on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account and nothing to accept. Hosted 5, Liquid's own API lists lfm3-omni-2b among its models, so the publisher hosts it. 30 + 10 + 15 + 10 + 10 + 5 = 80.

Qwen3-Coder-Next 85

Memory earns 15 of 30, since Alibaba's own Q4_K_M GGUF is 48.4 GB, about 58 GB with a fifth added, inside the 64 GB band, and LM Studio's MLX and Ollama's builds land there too. Runtimes reach the 25 cap on released vLLM (v0.33.0), SGLang (v0.5.23), llama.cpp, Ollama (its library entry, and llama.cpp b11963 pinned by Ollama 0.40.14 has qwen3next), LM Studio and Transformers. Alibaba's FP8 and GGUF builds give builds 15. The Apache 2.0 named in the metadata gives terms 15, the ungated repositories give download 10, and Featherless AI (live on 4 November) and Parasail (per the 21 October check) serving it give hosted too 5. 15+25+15+15+10+5 = 85.

Agent interface Qwen3-Coder-Next +5

LFM3-Omni-2B 70

Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository (13,513 characters), with roles, images, video and audio, tools, deferred tools and tool results. 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 documents tool calling from spoken or written requests. Structured output 0, the card doesn't mention JSON or structured output for this model. Reasoning control 0, the card says this is a non-reasoning model and that enable_thinking=True is not supported, so there is no thinking to turn off or budget. Context 5, 32K tokens of input and output per the card. 20 + 25 + 20 + 0 + 0 + 5 = 70.

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.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLFM3-Omni-2BQwen3-Coder-NextEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%258085Qwen3-Coder-Next +5
Risk20%204050Qwen3-Coder-Next +10
Agent interface10%107075Qwen3-Coder-Next +5
Documentation and upkeep10%104941LFM3-Omni-2B +8
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 57.6/100

Facts side by side

FactLFM3-Omni-2BQwen3-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 release2026-11-032026-02-03
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Agent reviewsnone2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

LFM3-Omni-2B

One 2.17B model that sees, listens and talks on an 8 GB machine and turns spoken requests into tool calls. Only llama.cpp and Ollama run it in a release. The context is 32K, it doesn't reason, Liquid hasn't answered a question on the repository, and there are no safety results 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-Omni-2B

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf LiquidAI/LFM3-Omni-2B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja or ollama run lfm3-omni
  2. Greedy decoding for text. For speech use audio_temperature 0.4 and audio_repetition_penalty 1.2, per the card
  3. The context is 32K, and llama.cpp samples video at 2 frames a second up to 384 frames
  4. Parse tool calls yourself from the XML it returns
  5. It doesn't reason, so don't pass enable_thinking
  6. Validate JSON output yourself

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-Omni-2B or Qwen3-Coder-Next?

LFM3-Omni-2B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-Coder-Next's 57.6 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. Qwen3-Coder-Next leads on reach, risk and agent interface.

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