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

LongCat-2.5 vs Qwen3-Coder-Next

Qwen3-Coder-Next scores 57.6 (C) on agent readiness against LongCat-2.5's 50.5 (D), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. LongCat-2.5 leads on risk and documentation and upkeep. 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

LongCat-2.5 D

Best for Operators with NPU clusters, and anyone tracking what the open flagships can do

Ahead on

  • Risk, 60 against 50
  • Documentation and upkeep, 46 against 41

Watch for

3,562 GB in BF16 and 1,336 GB at 4 bits

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 35

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.

Reach Qwen3-Coder-Next +50

LongCat-2.5 35

Memory 0, the smallest build is Meituan's W4A4 repository, 1,336 GB, and 1,336 GB × 1.2 = 1,603 GB, far above 256 GB. The BF16 files are 3,562 GB. Runtimes 0, none of the six runs it in a released version: vLLM 0.33.0, SGLang 0.5.23, Transformers 5.22.2 and llama.cpp b12242 have no LongcatCausalLM or pro_v code, and the model code config.json names isn't in the repository. Builds 10, one quantised build from Meituan, the W4A4 repository (4-bit experts, 1,336 GB). Terms 15, MIT in the metadata, the LICENSE file and the card, with nothing added. Download 10, the Hub API reports gated false for both repositories on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account and nothing to accept. Hosted 0, Hugging Face maps no inference provider to it. 0 + 0 + 10 + 15 + 10 + 0 = 35.

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.

Risk LongCat-2.5 +10

LongCat-2.5 60

File safety 25, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files and no Python in the repository. Provenance 15, the files sit in the meituan-longcat organisation, the name of Meituan's GitHub organisation that the card links for deployment, and the card's licence names Meituan (10). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results on the card. Agent guidance 5, General cautions under Usage Considerations: not evaluated for every use, assess accuracy, safety and fairness before sensitive use, and follow the law. Licence risk 15, MIT with no use policy, no threshold and no right to change the terms. Security programme 0, no way to report a flaw on the card beyond a general contact, and Meituan's own security pages weren't looked up, so this scores as absent and is an open question. 25 + 15 + 0 + 5 + 15 + 0 = 60.

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 LongCat-2.5 +5

LongCat-2.5 46

Model card 11, Intended use, limitations (the usage considerations), the architecture and the parameter counts are on the card. Training data 5, A general description of the training stages and where the reinforcement learning tasks came from, with no sources, sizes or cut-off. Last change 20, the last commit, on 10 November 2026, updated the card, on the day of this check. Responsiveness 0, Neither of the 2 discussions that aren't pull requests (9 and 10 November 2026) has a reply from a meituan-longcat member, counted on 10 November by author flags and dates with a script, text not read. Version policy 5, LongCat-2.0 stays in its own repositories and 2.5 came out in new ones, with no dated note on the older ones that we read. File health 5, the template is in both places and agrees, but config.json's auto_map names configuration_longcat_oe and modeling_longcat_oe, which aren't in the repository, and the tokenizer config's 131,072-token length is a quarter of the config's 524,288 positions. 11 + 5 + 20 + 0 + 5 + 5 = 46.

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.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLongCat-2.5Qwen3-Coder-NextEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%253585Qwen3-Coder-Next +50
Risk20%206050LongCat-2.5 +10
Agent interface10%107575even
Documentation and upkeep10%104641LongCat-2.5 +5
Negative events≤1500
TotalD 50.5/100C 57.6/100

Facts side by side

FactLongCat-2.5Qwen3-Coder-Next
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorMeituan (LongCat)Alibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMITApache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-11-102026-02-03
Terms last updatednot read yetno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Agent reviewsnone2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

LongCat-2.5

Meituan's flagship is MIT-licensed and documented for tool calling and switchable reasoning, with strong numbers of its own on agentic coding. Almost nobody can run it: 3,562 GB of weights, a 1,336 GB 4-bit build for NPU accelerators, and no released runtime with its architecture. A model to watch until a runtime or a provider picks it up.

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

LongCat-2.5

  1. You can't run this on a workstation or a single GPU server. Plan for a provider, and none serves it yet
  2. If an operator serves it, call it as an OpenAI-compatible chat API with tools in the function format
  3. Pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking true or false
  4. With thinking on, keep earlier reasoning in the history (save_history_reasoning_content true), as the card recommends
  5. The card's results use temperature 1.0 and top_p 0.95
  6. Its benchmark table is Meituan's own. The unmarked scores are in-house

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, LongCat-2.5 or Qwen3-Coder-Next?

Qwen3-Coder-Next scores 57.6 (C) on agent readiness against LongCat-2.5's 50.5 (D), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. LongCat-2.5 leads on risk and documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with LongCat-2.5 or Qwen3-Coder-Next

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.