Codestral 22B vs Qwen3 Coder Next

Codestral 22B

Mistral AI

Codestral is a 22-billion-parameter code-specialized model from Mistral AI, released in May 2024 as the company's first dedicated coding model, trained with focus on fill-in-the-middle (FIM) completion, code generation, and repair across 80+ programming languages. Unlike Mistral's general-purpose Apache 2.0 models, Codestral was released under a separate non-production research license, reflecting its positioning as a professional coding tool requiring commercial API access for production deployment. Its FIM support made it particularly valued for IDE integrations and code completion tools that need to insert code within existing contexts rather than only appending to the end.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen3 Coder Next is a coding-specialized open-weight model from Alibaba's Qwen3 family, built on the Qwen3-Next architecture with hybrid attention and Mixture-of-Experts design optimized for local development and agentic coding workflows. It targets on-device and self-hosted deployments requiring a capable coding agent that can operate within consumer hardware constraints.