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

MiniCPM-o 4.5 vs Qwen3.5-4B

Qwen3.5-4B and MiniCPM-o 4.5 score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61.2 (C) and 61 (C). MiniCPM-o 4.5 leads on reach 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 2870 open weights comparisons

Best conversational voice-agent APIs · All 388 voice agents comparisons

Which one, for what

MiniCPM-o 4.5 C

Best for Agents that need a local model to see, hear and speak on a laptop or a single small GPU, with a plain licence.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 85
  • Documentation and upkeep, 66 against 34

Watch for

Speech output and full duplex need trust_remote_code with Transformers 4.51.0 or OpenBMB's llama.cpp-omni

Qwen3.5-4B C

Best for Agents that want a cheap local helper for tool calls, short reasoning and reading images on a laptop or small GPU

Ahead on

  • Risk, 55 against 40
  • Agent interface, 70 against 35

Watch for

No quantised build from Alibaba for this size

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runMiniCPM-o 4.5Qwen3.5-4BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%259085MiniCPM-o 4.5 +5
Risk20%204055Qwen3.5-4B +15
Agent interface10%103570Qwen3.5-4B +35
Documentation and upkeep10%106634MiniCPM-o 4.5 +32
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 61.2/100

Facts side by side

FactMiniCPM-o 4.5Qwen3.5-4B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorOpenBMBAlibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0; built from Qwen3-8B, SigLIP2, Whisper-medium and CosyVoice2, all Apache 2.0 on their Hub cardsApache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-10-162026-03-02
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 reviews2.8/5 (4)3/5 (4)

Verdicts

MiniCPM-o 4.5

A small omni cousin that sees, listens and talks back, with full-duplex speech and voice cloning, in about 7 GB at 4-bit through llama.cpp or Ollama for text and images. Speech output needs OpenBMB's remote code or llama.cpp-omni, and 28 GB of GPU for the full demo. The main risks are repository code and pickle files and no safety results.

Qwen3.5-4B

A small vision-language cousin for tool calls, light agent steps and image or video reading on almost any machine, with switchable thinking. Ollama's 3.3 GB build or the 9.3 GB BF16 files run in every major runtime under plain Apache 2.0. The main risks are no safety results, no structured-output guarantee and no answers from Alibaba since March.

Before you call either

MiniCPM-o 4.5

  1. Quickest start for text and images is ollama run openbmb/minicpm-o4.5, about 6 GB
  2. With vLLM 0.16.0 or later pass --trust-remote-code, and send stop_token_ids [151643, 151645] as OpenBMB's guide does
  3. vLLM, llama.cpp and Ollama return text only; for speech out use the card's Transformers 4.51.0 code or OpenBMB's llama.cpp-omni
  4. In llama.cpp pass both the language GGUF and MiniCPM-o-4_5-vision-F16.gguf with --mmproj, and use --jinja --reasoning-budget 0 to turn thinking off
  5. Keep prompts within 40,960 tokens
  6. Don't rely on tool calls or JSON output, neither is documented; validate any you get

Qwen3.5-4B

  1. Smallest start is ollama run qwen3.5:4b (Q4_K_M, about 4 GB with context)
  2. Full precision vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3.5-4B --port 8000 --max-model-len 262144 --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder
  3. Turn thinking off with "chat_template_kwargs": {"enable_thinking": false} in the request body, since it's on by default and /think and /nothink aren't supported
  4. There's no generation_config.json, so pass the card's sampling yourself, for example temperature=0.7, top_p=0.8, top_k=20, presence_penalty=1.5 without thinking
  5. Keep the context at 128K or more if you rely on thinking, and turn on YaRN only past 262,144 tokens
  6. Validate any JSON it returns, since structured output isn't documented

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, MiniCPM-o 4.5 or Qwen3.5-4B?

Qwen3.5-4B and MiniCPM-o 4.5 score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61.2 (C) and 61 (C). MiniCPM-o 4.5 leads on reach and documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with MiniCPM-o 4.5 or Qwen3.5-4B

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.