MiniMax M2.1 vs Qwen2.5 72B Instruct

MiniMax

MiniMax M2.1, released by MiniMax on December 23, 2025, is a large language model with approximately 230 billion parameters featuring strong multi-language programming capabilities and an industry-leading multilingual coding profile. It features a 196K token context window and is optimized for complex real-world software engineering tasks across Rust, Java, Golang, C++, TypeScript, and other languages. M2.1 targets agentic coding workflows and applications requiring production-grade programming across diverse language environments.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct is the flagship of Alibaba's Qwen2.5 series, a 72-billion-parameter open-weight model released in September 2024 after training on 18 trillion tokens spanning code, mathematics, and multilingual text. It offers strong generalist performance across coding, instruction-following, and structured reasoning while remaining fully open-weight under Apache 2.0 — a combination that made it a widely referenced model in open-source evaluations and community benchmarking. The 128K context window and built-in structured output support made it a common choice for document analysis and multi-step agentic pipeline development.