Best StarCoder alternatives

Chinese AI lab's open-weight model family, including V3 for general tasks, R1 for reasoning, and a dedicated Coder line, free to self-host or use commercially.

Mistral's 22B-parameter code model with a 256k context window and fill-in-the-middle completion. Relicensed to Apache 2.0 in April 2026.

Alibaba's open-weight code model family, with the 32B variant matching GPT-4o on several coding benchmarks while staying free to self-host under an Apache 2.0 license.

Open-source code-generation model family from Salesforce Research, trained up to 16B parameters, with CodeGen2.5 matching larger models at 7B.

Microsoft's small language model family, with Phi-3-mini delivering GPT-3.5-level capability at 3.8B parameters. Superseded by Phi-4 and later releases.