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

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B vs Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct's 55.7 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct leads on reach and agent interface. 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

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B C

Best for Researchers and agents that want a small coding and terminal-agent model to fine-tune further, on a 24 GB GPU or larger.

Ahead on

  • Risk, 60 against 55
  • Documentation and upkeep, 40 against 31

Watch for

Only BF16 from Xiaomi, about 23 GB to run

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct C

Best for Coding agents and local coding tools that want a fast, capable open model on one 24 GB GPU or a 32 GB Mac, with a plain licence.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 70
  • Agent interface, 75 against 70

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 2.8 against 2.3 out of 5

Watch for

No safety results, prompt-injection guidance or security contact, though it's meant to run commands

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BQwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-InstructEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%257090Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct +20
Risk20%206055MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +5
Agent interface10%107075Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct +5
Documentation and upkeep10%104031MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +9
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 55.7/100

Facts side by side

FactMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BQwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorXiaomi (MiMo team)Alibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMIT (metadata only, no LICENSE file); built on Qwen3.5-9B under Apache 2.0Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-09-212025-12-03
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)2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B

A 9B cousin tuned on MiMo-V2.6's agent work for coding, terminal tasks and visual coding, released as a base for RL research. It needs about 23 GB in BF16, since Xiaomi ships no smaller build. The main risks are no safety results while a seventh of its tuning is offensive security, and nobody at Xiaomi answering reports.

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct

A fast coding cousin, with 3.3B of 30.5B parameters active per token, for agentic coding tools, repository reading and fill-in-the-middle without a thinking step. It needs about 21 to 23 GB at 4 bits, and several providers host it. The main risk is that it runs commands for agents with no safety results or guidance, and Alibaba doesn't answer users.

Before you call either

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B

  1. Serve it as the card does, sglang serve --model-path XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B --reasoning-parser mimo, and add --tool-call-parser mimo for parsed tool calls
  2. SGLang's mimo reasoning parser expects thinking to be asked for, so pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking true, as the card does, and read reasoning_content
  3. Calls come back as function and parameter blocks inside tool_call, the same shape vLLM's and SGLang's qwen3_coder parsers read
  4. The generation config samples at temperature 0.6, top_k 20 and top_p 0.95
  5. Images and video go in through Qwen3.5's processor; the template's audio tokens have no audio encoder behind them
  6. The MTP head isn't in the files, so skip MTP speculative decoding even though config.json lists a layer
  7. It's an SFT checkpoint meant for further RL, and discussions report runaway generation on llama.cpp, so cap max_tokens

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct

  1. Quickest start is ollama run qwen3-coder:30b, 19 GB
  2. On our reference machine use BF16 with vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct --max-model-len 262144 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder, 61 GB of weights fits the GPU share
  3. Use the qwen3_coder parser in vLLM or SGLang, not hermes, since calls come back as function and parameter blocks rather than JSON
  4. Pass tool-call arguments in the history as objects, the template iterates them as a mapping
  5. Sampling per the card is temperature 0.7, top_p 0.8, top_k 20 and repetition_penalty 1.05, with up to 65,536 output tokens
  6. For code completion use the fill-in-the-middle tokens <|fim_prefix|>, <|fim_suffix|> and <|fim_middle|> from Qwen's README
  7. Sandbox the commands and files it touches, since nothing from Alibaba covers prompt injection

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B or Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct?

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct's 55.7 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct leads on reach and agent interface.

Other comparisons with MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B or Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct

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