Qwen3-VL Flash vs Step-3.5-Flash

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen3-VL Flash is a lightweight multimodal variant from Alibaba's Qwen3-VL family, designed for efficient visual reasoning and image understanding at lower inference cost. It inherits the joint visual-textual architecture of the Qwen3-VL series and targets latency-sensitive applications requiring multimodal input processing at scale.

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.