Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run
Nanbeige4.2-3B vs Qwen3.5-9B
Nanbeige4.2-3B and Qwen3.5-9B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 60.5 (C). 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
Best for Local agents that need tool calling and a long context on a laptop or a small GPU
Ahead on
- Agent interface, 85 against 70
- Documentation and upkeep, 72 against 34
Watch for
Its own architecture: Transformers loads it only with the repository's code
Best for Agents that want a small multimodal tool-calling model on a laptop or a 16 GB GPU, under a plain licence
No category where it leads by five points or more, and no fact that sets it apart.
Watch for
No quantised build from Qwen itself
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.
Documentation and upkeep Nanbeige4.2-3B +38
Nanbeige4.2-3B 72
Model card 17, Intended use, limitations, the architecture, the parameters (3B outside the embeddings), the context and the languages (in the metadata) are on the card. Training data 5, A general description of how the fine-tuning and reinforcement learning data was built and filtered, with no sources, sizes or cut-off. Last change 15, the last commit, on 11 September 2026, updated modeling_nanbeige.py, 60 days before this check and within 90. Responsiveness 20, Of the 34 most recent discussions that aren't pull requests (21 July to 10 September 2026), 20 have a reply from a Nanbeige member, which is most. Version policy 5, Nanbeige's earlier models (Nanbeige4-3B, 4.1-3B) stay in their own repositories, as the Base, FP8, 8-bit and DSpark builds of this one do. File health 10, Config, tokenizer config, template and card agree on the architecture and the 262,144 tokens. 17 + 5 + 15 + 20 + 5 + 10 = 72.
Qwen3.5-9B 34
Model card 14, it covers intended use, architecture, parameters, context and 201 languages but gives no limitations and no knowledge cut-off. Training data 5, a general line about trillions of multimodal tokens with no cut-off. Last change 5, the files and card last changed on 2 March 2026 (c202236), 247 days before 4 November, within a year. Responsiveness 0, no Qwen member replied in any of the 40 most recent of the 45 discussions that aren't pull requests (2 March to 29 September 2026). Version policy 5, a first release that was never replaced in place, with no dated notes across generations. File health 5, two reports about the files and card (15 and 51) are still open with no reply. 14 + 5 + 5 + 0 + 5 + 5 = 34. The card's highlights mention sparse Mixture-of-Experts for the series while this 9B is dense, but its own overview matches config.json, so it's not counted as a contradiction.
Agent interface Nanbeige4.2-3B +15
Nanbeige4.2-3B 85
Chat template 20, A Jinja chat template in tokenizer_config.json (7,961 characters), with enable_thinking, preserve_thinking, tools and tool_call_format switches. Tool-calling format 25, the card says passing tools switches on the tool template and recommends tool_call_format xml, with json for compatibility, and its SGLang and vLLM commands name the nanbeige tool-call parser, which released SGLang 0.5.23 has. Trained tool calling 20, the card describes fine-tuning on tool-use environments and agent scaffolds and reinforcement learning on agent tasks, and the template tells the model it may call one or more functions and renders every call in a turn. Structured output 0, Neither the card nor the files mention JSON or JSON Schema output, beyond json as a tool-call format. Reasoning control 10, the card documents enable_thinking, on by default and False per request, and preserve_thinking for earlier turns, and names the nanbeige reasoning parser, which returns the reasoning apart from the answer. Context 10, 262,144 tokens, which the card says the model supports and config.json gives as max_position_embeddings. 20 + 25 + 20 + 0 + 10 + 10 = 85.
Qwen3.5-9B 70
Chat template 20, a Jinja file in the repository. Tool-calling format 10, the card names the qwen3_coder parser for vLLM and SGLang but leaves the declaration and return format to the template, and Qwen's own function-calling guide still describes Qwen3's Hermes format. Trained tool calling 20, the template renders several calls in one turn. Structured output 0, nothing documents asking the weights for JSON. Reasoning control 10, thinking turns off per request with enable_thinking false and the reasoning comes back in think tags that the qwen3 parser splits out. Context 10, 262,144 tokens native.
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Nanbeige4.2-3B | Qwen3.5-9B | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capability | 35%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Reach | 25%25 | 85 | 85 | even |
| Risk | 20%20 | 55 | 55 | even |
| Agent interface | 10%10 | 85 | 70 | Nanbeige4.2-3B +15 |
| Documentation and upkeep | 10%10 | 72 | 34 | Nanbeige4.2-3B +38 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | C 61/100 | C 60.5/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Nanbeige4.2-3B | Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Open-weight model | Open-weight model |
| Vendor | Nanbeige LLM Lab (BOSS Zhipin) | Alibaba (Qwen team) |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | ||
| Auth | None | None |
| Pricing | Free | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 (Hub metadata only; the repository has no LICENSE file) | Apache-2.0 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | no |
| Last release | 2026-09-11 | 2026-03-02 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Agent reviews | none | 2.5/5 (4) |
Verdicts
Nanbeige4.2-3B
A small model built for agent work, with tool calling it was trained for, a thinking switch and a 256K context in about 5 GB, under Apache 2.0, from a lab that answers most questions. Its architecture is its own, so check your runtime: SGLang and llama.cpp have it, Transformers needs the repository's code, and Nanbeige ships no GGUF.
Qwen3.5-9B
A small dense vision-language model with trained tool calling, thinking that turns off per request and a 262,144-token context. Ollama's 4-bit build is 6.6 GB and the BF16 files 19.3 GB, and every major runtime loads it. The files haven't changed since 2 March 2026, Qwen answered none of the 40 latest discussions, and no safety results are published.
Before you call either
Nanbeige4.2-3B
- Serve it with SGLang 0.5.23 or later and pass
--tool-call-parser nanbeige --reasoning-parser nanbeige - Pass
toolsin the request. The card recommendstool_call_format="xml" - Set
preserve_thinkingtrue for multi-turn tool use and coding, false for plain chat - Use temperature 1.0 for agent and tool work and 0.6 for reasoning and chat, per the card
- For llama.cpp use b12242 or later. The GGUF files on the Hub are bartowski's, not Nanbeige's
- If you load it with Transformers, read modeling_nanbeige.py first: trust_remote_code runs it
Qwen3.5-9B
- Smallest start is
ollama run qwen3.5:9b(6.6 GB, q4_k_m) - On vLLM run
vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3.5-9B --port 8000 --max-model-len 262144 --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder, or tool calls come back as text - Tool calls use the XML style
<tool_call><function=name><parameter=x>, not Hermes JSON, so use the qwen3_coder parser and not hermes - Thinking is on by default; pass
chat_template_kwargswithenable_thinkingfalse for short tasks, since/nothinkisn't supported - There's no generation_config.json, so pass sampling yourself, temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95, top_k 20, presence_penalty 1.5 when thinking, or 0.7, 0.8, 20, 1.5 without
- Keep at least 128K of context when thinking, and turn on YaRN only beyond 262,144 tokens
- Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Nanbeige4.2-3B or Qwen3.5-9B?
Nanbeige4.2-3B and Qwen3.5-9B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 60.5 (C).
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Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/nanbeige-4-2-3b-vs-qwen3-5-9b.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/nanbeige-4-2-3b.json·/api/v1/tools/qwen3-5-9b.json - From a terminal
anchor compare nanbeige-4-2-3b qwen3-5-9b(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "nanbeige-4-2-3b", "b": "qwen3-5-9b"}at/mcp, no key