Qwen Code
An Apache-2.0 agent that measures itself against Claude Code and runs on any provider.
Qwen Code (Apache-2.0, from the Qwen team at Alibaba Cloud) is an open-source coding agent for the terminal, IDE plugins for VS Code, JetBrains and Zed, a desktop app, a web UI and chat. It began as a fork of Google's Gemini CLI v0.8.2 and has developed independently since v0.1. Its README compares it to Claude Code feature by feature (subagents and agent teams, skills, hooks, MCP, plan mode, sandboxing) and it is multi-protocol: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and Qwen APIs, any third-party provider, or local models through Ollama or vLLM. It has deep integrations for Alibaba's own Qwen models, which is both its strength and its bias.
What it does well
- +Near feature parity with Claude Code on paper, per its own comparison table: subagents, skills, hooks, MCP, plan mode and sandbox
- +Multi-protocol: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and Qwen APIs, any third-party provider, or local Ollama and vLLM
- +A wide surface: terminal, VS Code, JetBrains and Zed plugins, desktop app, web UI and SDK
- +Very active, with commits daily and about 28k GitHub stars
Where it falls short
- −Tuned first for Qwen models; other providers work, but that is where the integration is deepest
- −The parity table is the project's own claim, so test it on your repository before relying on it
- −The default standalone installer downloads from an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket; npm (Node 22+) and Homebrew are alternatives if your policy cares where binaries come from
Hardware note
The agent itself is a Node.js CLI that runs on modest machines. Local models via Ollama or vLLM carry the usual cost: roughly 24 GB of VRAM or a 32 GB+ unified-memory machine for a 30B-class quantised coding model.
Qwen Code as an alternative to
Where Qwen Code shows up in our comparisons, and how it ranked.
Qwen Code head-to-head
Straight comparisons against the tools people weigh it against.