DeepSeek or Qwen: which to choose for business
Both lines are in Ollama and reach sizes that need a cluster. DeepSeek is MIT (except V2 and earlier), allows commercial use, offers context up to 1M tokens and is listed for tool-using agents, long contracts and coding help; CPU use is not marked and Russian support is not confirmed in its card. Qwen is marked as supporting Russian and has very small versions from 0.6B that run on a CPU, but the larger Qwen3.8 models carry their own license. The newest DeepSeek release is V4.1-Flash (2026-09), the newest Qwen is Qwen3.8 (2026-08).
Comparison based on catalog data
| Parameter | DeepSeek | Qwen |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Text, Image + text | Text, Image + text |
| Developer | DeepSeek, China | Alibaba, China |
| Releases | Nov 2023 – Sep 2026 | Aug 2023 – Aug 2026 |
| Sizes | 7B – 1.6T-A49B | 0,6B – 2,4T-A95B |
| Hardware | Laptop, 1 GPU, Cluster | Laptop, 1 GPU, Cluster |
| Commercial use | Commercial use allowed | Commercial use with conditions |
| License | MIT (V2 and earlier versions: DeepSeek's own license prohibiting harmful use) | Apache 2.0 (most versions); the larger Qwen3.8 models have their own license |
| Russian | Not stated | Supported |
| Ollama | Yes | Yes |
| Without GPU | No | Yes |
| Tasks |
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Choose DeepSeek if
- You process very long documents: context goes up to 1M tokens
- You build agents that work with tools and APIs
- You want MIT on current versions with commercial use allowed
Choose Qwen if
- Confirmed Russian support is critical for the task
- The model must run on modest hardware or without a GPU
- Your tasks are e-commerce and support: product copy, replies to requests
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