Side-by-side comparison of DeepSeek R1 (DeepSeek · China) and Qwen 3.5 (Alibaba · China) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. DeepSeek R1 is rated conditional; Qwen 3.5 is conditional. They part ways on licence: DeepSeek R1 is "MIT", Qwen 3.5 is "Apache 2.0".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | Conditional Frontier reasoning model at o1-class performance. MIT licence makes weights legally clean. Same Chinese-origin alignment/supply-chain considerations as DeepSeek V3. Distilled Qwen/Llama versions inherit their base licence. | Conditional Hybrid Gated-DeltaNet + MoE flagship (397B total, 17B active) under Apache 2.0. Native vision, 201 languages, 262K context (1M with YaRN). Licence is clean; Chinese-origin alignment and supply-chain considerations persist. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-04-15 | 2026-04-15 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | MIT | Apache 2.0 |
| Commercial use | Yes | Yes |
| Training data | Undisclosed | Undisclosed |
| Origin | China | China |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 27/100 | 40/100 |
| Speed | — | 53 tok/s |
| Blended price | $2.36/M | $1.35/M |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.