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

Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 vs Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-27B

Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-27B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507's 56.6 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 leads on reach, risk 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

Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 C

Best for Agents that want a fast, capable instruct model on one 24 GB GPU or a 32 GB Mac, with a plain licence and long context.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 80
  • Risk, 55 against 50
  • Agent interface, 75 against 60

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

Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-27B C

Best for Agents on a 24 to 32 GB GPU or Mac that want Qwen3.8-27B's skills with shorter thinking, for teams under US$1M revenue or research.

Ahead on

  • Documentation and upkeep, 43 against 26

Watch for

Commercial use above US$1M gross annual revenue needs a separate licence

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runQwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-27BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%259080Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 +10
Risk20%205550Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 +5
Agent interface10%107560Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 +15
Documentation and upkeep10%102643Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-27B +17
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 56.6/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactQwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-27B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorAlibaba (Qwen team)UkisAI
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0Swift Open License v1.0 (custom, not an OSI licence) on UkisAI's changes, free for commercial use below US$1M gross annual revenue with a separate Swift Enterprise License above it. Built on Qwen3.8-27B, whose Apache 2.0 still governs the base
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2025-09-172026-09-24
Terms last updatedno 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)2.3/5 (4)

Verdicts

Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507

A quick general-purpose cousin, with 3.3B of 30.5B parameters active per token, for instruction following, tool calling and long documents without a thinking step. It needs about 21 to 23 GB at 4 bits, and several providers host it. The main risk is neglect, with no file changes in over a year, no answers from Alibaba and no safety results.

Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-27B

A Qwen3.8-27B cousin post-trained to think in fewer tokens, for coding and agent work with images in, that fits a 24 GB machine with UkisAI's own 4-bit builds. Commercial use is free only below US$1M revenue. The main risks are that nobody at UkisAI answers its discussions, and that the shorter thinking rests on UkisAI's own benchmarks.

Before you call either

Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507

  1. Quickest start is ollama run qwen3:30b-instruct, 19 GB. Plain qwen3:30b and qwen3:30b-a3b are the Thinking-2507 edition, not this one
  2. On our reference machine use BF16 with vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 --max-model-len 262144 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser hermes, 61 GB of weights fits the GPU share
  3. Use the hermes parser in vLLM or qwen25 in SGLang, the template emits JSON inside tool_call tags
  4. Don't pass enable_thinking, this edition never thinks and the card says the flag isn't needed
  5. Sampling per the card is temperature 0.7, top_p 0.8, top_k 20 and min_p 0, with presence_penalty up to 2 against repetition
  6. Leave config.json as it is unless you need more than 262,144 tokens, the 1M mode swaps in config_1m.json and runs one sequence at a time
  7. Validate JSON yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented

Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-27B

  1. Quickest start is llama-server -hf ukisai/Swift-1.5-Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja, about 18.4 GB with the vision projector
  2. On our reference machine BF16 fits, vllm serve ukisai/Swift-1.5-Qwen3.8-27b --max-model-len 262144 --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder
  3. The template is Qwen3.8-27B's, so chat_template_kwargs with reasoning_effort low, medium or xhigh (default) and enable_thinking false work as on the base
  4. UkisAI benchmarked it at temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95, top_k 20 and presence_penalty 0, which is a reasonable starting point
  5. The MLX 4-bit build needs UkisAI's patched MLX-LM and has no image or video chat
  6. Check the licence before commercial use, it stops at US$1M gross annual revenue including affiliates
  7. MTP self-speculative decoding is available with the base's head, flags on the card

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 or Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-27B?

Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-27B scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507's 56.6 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 leads on reach, risk and agent interface.

Other comparisons with Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 or Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-27B

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.