Qwen2.5-Coder 7B Instruct vs Qwen3-Coder-480B

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct is a 7-billion-parameter code-specialized model from Alibaba, released in November 2024 as part of the Qwen2.5-Coder family, trained on a curated corpus spanning 92 programming languages with emphasis on code generation, debugging, and fill-in-the-middle completion. Built on the Qwen2.5 architecture, it extends the base series' improvements in instruction-following and long-context handling to coding-specific tasks within a compact deployable footprint. It became popular for integration into IDE extensions, CI pipelines, and self-hosted code assistant tools.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct, released by Alibaba's Qwen team on July 22, 2025, is a Mixture-of-Experts large language model with 480 billion total parameters and 35 billion active parameters per inference, specifically designed for agentic coding tasks. It features a 256K token native context window (extendable to 1M tokens with extrapolation) and demonstrated competitive performance on agentic coding, browser automation, and tool-use benchmarks. Qwen3-Coder-480B targets automated software engineering, multi-step code agents, and open-source coding deployments under the Apache 2.0 license.