Best Qwen2.5-Coder 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.

Open-access code model family from the BigCode project, with StarCoder2 in 3B, 7B, and 15B sizes, trained on The Stack v2 across 600+ languages.

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 Superseded by Phi-4 and later releases.