Qwen3 Coder Next vs Step-3.5-Flash

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.

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.