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

Ornith-1.5-397B vs Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct

Ornith-1.5-397B scores 59 (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 risk. 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

Ornith-1.5-397B C

Best for A self-hosted frontier-scale coding agent on an 8-GPU server, where a clear licence file and an answering publisher aren't required

Ahead on

  • Agent interface, 85 against 75
  • Documentation and upkeep, 36 against 31

Watch for

Needs about 290 GB of memory at 4 bits and about 970 GB in BF16, so it doesn't fit the reference machine

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 65
  • Risk, 55 against 50

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 2.8 against 2.0 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 runOrnith-1.5-397BQwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-InstructEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%256590Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct +25
Risk20%205055Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct +5
Agent interface10%108575Ornith-1.5-397B +10
Documentation and upkeep10%103631Ornith-1.5-397B +5
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 59/100C 55.7/100

Facts side by side

FactOrnith-1.5-397BQwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorOrnithAlibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMITApache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-08-232025-12-03
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 reviews2/5 (4)2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

Ornith-1.5-397B

Ornith's flagship coding and terminal-agent cousin, with XML tool calls that vLLM and SGLang parse and 262,144 tokens of context. It needs about 290 GB even at 4 bits, so a multi-GPU server, not the 128 GB reference machine. The main risk is an absent publisher, with no licence file, no safety results and files replaced without a note.

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

Ornith-1.5-397B

  1. Start it with the card's vLLM command at --tensor-parallel-size 8, or ollama run ornith-1.5:397b on a machine with about 300 GB of memory
  2. In vLLM pass --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_xml --reasoning-parser qwen3, and in SGLang --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder --reasoning-parser qwen3, so tool calls and reasoning come back parsed
  3. Thinking is on by default. Send chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, a switch the card doesn't mention
  4. Pin which template your runtime loads, since chat_template.jinja keeps earlier reasoning and the tokenizer_config.json template drops it
  5. When downloading the NVFP4 build, fetch only the files its model.safetensors.index.json names (the 25-shard set, 241.7 GB), not the eight extra shards
  6. Pin a revision when you download, since Ornith has replaced files in place
  7. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented

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, Ornith-1.5-397B or Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct?

Ornith-1.5-397B scores 59 (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 risk.

Other comparisons with Ornith-1.5-397B or Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct

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