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Alibaba

Qwen3.5 2B

Qwen3.5 2B is a small-parameter chat model from Alibaba's Qwen family, positioned at the lightweight end of the Qwen3.5 generation.

Input from
$0.060 / 1M tokens
across 1 provider

API Pricing

ProviderInput / 1MOutput / 1MCached / 1M
$0.060$0.180$0.054

Prices updated daily. Last check: Sep 28, 2026

Qwen3.5 2B pricing by provider

Input, output, and batch rates, plus alternatives, for one provider at a time.

Performance & Benchmarks

Source: Artificial Analysis →
Intelligence
6.2 / 100
Coding
2.4 / 100

Reasoning & Knowledge

  • GPQA Diamond43.8%
  • Humanity's Last Exam5.0%

Agentic & Tool Use

  • Terminal-Bench Hard3.8%
  • Terminal-Bench v2.10.0%
  • τ²-bench81.6%

Instruction & Long Context

  • IFBench29.1%
  • Long-Context Reasoning14.0%

Benchmarks measured Sep 2026. Scores are independent evaluations, not vendor-reported.

Model Details

General

Creator
Alibaba
Modalities
Text

Capabilities

Tool Calling
No
Open Source
No

Strengths & Limitations

Strengths

  • Small 2B parameter count keeps serving hardware requirements low, making self-hosting on a single consumer or entry-level datacenter GPU feasible
  • Entry-tier sizing in the Qwen3.5 generation gives a clear cost and latency step below the family's mid-size and large variants
  • Small models in this class are well suited to high-volume, repetitive text tasks where per-request cost dominates
  • Part of Alibaba's Qwen line, which has a large ecosystem of tooling, quantizations, and community fine-tunes around its smaller checkpoints
  • Compact footprint makes it a candidate for edge, on-premise, and latency-sensitive deployments where a remote API call is undesirable
  • Useful as a router, pre-filter, or draft model in front of a larger model in a tiered inference pipeline

Limitations

  • A 2B-parameter model has less capacity for multi-step reasoning, long-horizon planning, and complex code generation than larger Qwen3.5 variants
  • We do not currently track a confirmed context window for this model — verify the limit with your chosen provider before designing long-input workflows
  • We have no published benchmark scores for Qwen3.5 2B in our database, so capability comparisons against peers cannot be made from our data
  • Throughput and time-to-first-token figures are not yet recorded for this entry, so latency expectations must come from provider testing
  • Hosted availability for very small models is often narrower than for popular mid-size models, which can limit provider choice

Key Features

•Chat/instruction-following interface for conversational and single-turn prompting
•Approximately 2 billion parameters, the compact tier of the Qwen3.5 generation
•Built by Alibaba as part of the Qwen model family
•Small enough for single-GPU serving and quantized local deployment
•Suitable for batch and high-throughput text processing workloads
•Candidate draft model for speculative decoding alongside a larger Qwen sibling
•Provider options and current rates tracked in the pricing table on this page

About Qwen3.5 2B

Qwen3.5 2B is a chat-oriented large language model from Alibaba, part of the Qwen3.5 model generation. At roughly 2 billion parameters, it sits at the small end of the family's size range, below the mid-size and large variants that Alibaba typically releases alongside compact models in the same generation. The Qwen series has historically spanned a wide ladder of sizes so that developers can pick a capacity point that matches their latency and cost constraints, and the 2B tier is the entry point on that ladder. Models in this size class are generally used where response latency and per-request cost matter more than maximum reasoning depth. A 2B-parameter model can be served on modest hardware and, when hosted, tends to produce tokens quickly relative to larger siblings. We do not currently track a confirmed context window, modality list, or benchmark scores for Qwen3.5 2B in our database, so this page does not state figures for those; check the provider's own documentation for the context length and feature set exposed by a specific endpoint, since hosted limits sometimes differ from the model's native configuration. In practice, small Qwen models are deployed for high-volume text tasks — classification, extraction, summarization of short documents, routing inside a larger pipeline, and on-device or edge assistants — where a larger model would be over-provisioned. If a workload involves long multi-step reasoning, complex code generation, or agentic tool loops, the larger members of the Qwen3.5 family or comparable mid-size models from other creators are the more common choice. Providers and pricing for Qwen3.5 2B are listed in the pricing table on this page.

Common Use Cases

Qwen3.5 2B fits workloads where volume and latency matter more than depth: intent classification, sentiment and topic labeling, structured field extraction from short records, query rewriting, content moderation pre-filters, autocomplete-style suggestions, and short-form summarization. Its small parameter count also makes it a reasonable pick for on-device or on-premise assistants where data cannot leave the environment, and for use as a cheap first-pass model that escalates hard requests to a larger Qwen3.5 variant or another frontier-class model. For tasks involving long documents, multi-file code changes, mathematical proof-style reasoning, or multi-tool agent loops, a larger model is generally the better match — test the 2B tier on your own evaluation set before committing to it for anything beyond narrow, well-defined tasks.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does Qwen3.5 2B cost to use?

Pricing depends on which provider hosts the model and on the pricing model in use — per-token API billing, dedicated capacity, or renting GPU hours to self-host. Rates move often and differ substantially between providers, so consult the pricing table on this page for current figures rather than relying on any fixed number.

What is Qwen3.5 2B best used for?

High-volume, latency-sensitive text tasks: classification, extraction, short summarization, query rewriting, request routing, and local or edge assistants. It is the compact tier of the Qwen3.5 family, so it is intended for workloads where a larger model would be over-provisioned.

How does Qwen3.5 2B differ from larger Qwen3.5 models?

The main difference is capacity. At around 2 billion parameters it requires far less memory and compute to serve than the family's mid-size and large variants, which generally translates to lower cost and faster responses but less headroom for complex reasoning, long-context work, and demanding code generation.

What context window does Qwen3.5 2B support?

We do not currently track a confirmed context window for this model, and hosted endpoints sometimes expose a shorter limit than a model's native configuration. Check the documentation of the specific provider you plan to use before building around a particular input length.

Can Qwen3.5 2B be run locally?

A 2B-parameter model is generally small enough to run on a single GPU and, with quantization, on consumer hardware. Whether you can run this specific checkpoint locally depends on how Alibaba has distributed it — verify the license and availability of the weights before planning a self-hosted deployment.