Comprehensive side-by-side LLM comparison
. Both models have their strengths depending on your specific coding needs.
Alibaba / Qwen
Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct is a 32-billion-parameter open-weight model from Alibaba's Qwen team, released in September 2024 as part of the Qwen2.5 series trained on 18 trillion tokens. The model is positioned as a high-capability option for developers with access to multi-GPU setups or high-VRAM hardware, offering strong performance on coding, structured reasoning, and multilingual tasks while remaining fully open under Apache 2.0. Its 128K context window and support for structured output generation made it a popular choice for document processing and agentic workflows in the open-source community.
StepFun
Step-3.5-Flash, released by StepFun on February 2, 2026, is a Mixture-of-Experts large language model with 197 billion total parameters and approximately 11 billion active parameters per inference. It features a 256K token context window using a 3:1 sliding-window-to-full-attention ratio, processing 100–350 tokens per second. Step-3.5-Flash targets agentic tasks, coding workflows, and open-source deployments requiring frontier reasoning capabilities with efficient inference, under an Apache 2.0 license.
1 year newer
Qwen2.5 32B Instruct
Alibaba / Qwen
2024-09-19
Step-3.5-Flash
StepFun
2026-02-02
Available providers and their performance metrics
Qwen2.5 32B Instruct
Step-3.5-Flash
Qwen2.5 32B Instruct
Step-3.5-Flash