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

MiniCPM-o 4.5 vs Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct

MiniCPM-o 4.5 scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct's 55.7 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct leads on risk and agent interface. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

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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

  • Documentation and upkeep, 66 against 31

Watch for

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

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

  • Risk, 55 against 40
  • Agent interface, 75 against 35

Watch for

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

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runMiniCPM-o 4.5Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-InstructEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%259090even
Risk20%204055Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct +15
Agent interface10%103575Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct +40
Documentation and upkeep10%106631MiniCPM-o 4.5 +35
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 55.7/100

Facts side by side

FactMiniCPM-o 4.5Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct
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 release2026-10-162025-12-03
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 reviews2.8/5 (4)2.8/5 (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-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

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-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, MiniCPM-o 4.5 or Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct?

MiniCPM-o 4.5 scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct's 55.7 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct leads on risk and agent interface.

Other comparisons with MiniCPM-o 4.5 or Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct

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