North Mini Code vs Qwen 3
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •North Mini Code is meaningfully stronger at speed (88 vs 78 on our capability index).
- •Qwen 3 is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (30 vs 5).
- •Qwen 3 is open-weights (free to self-host); North Mini Code is paid API only.
- •North Mini Code has a 256K tokens context window vs 128K tokens (32K for 0.6B/1.7B/4B dense variants) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| North Mini Code | Qwen 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Cohere | Alibaba (Qwen Team) |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | ✓256K tokens | 128K tokens (32K for 0.6B/1.7B/4B dense variants) |
| Input / 1M tokens | 0 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | 0 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2026-06 | 2025-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | North Mini Code | Qwen 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Artificial Analysis Coding Index | 33.4 | - |
| Throughput vs Devstral Small 2 | Up to 2.8x higher output throughput | - |
| Qwen3-235B-A22B | - | 235B total / 22B active |
| Qwen3-30B-A3B | - | 30B total / 3B active |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose North Mini Code if...
- →You want a self-hostable, sovereign coding agent on modest hardware
- →You run agentic SWE workflows (repo edits, sub-agent orchestration, code review)
- →You need terminal/tool-driven multi-turn agents
- →You want high coding throughput at low compute cost
Choose Qwen 3 if...
- →You need an open, self-hostable model with a permissive license
- →You want to toggle deep reasoning on or off per request
- →Multilingual applications
- →Efficient inference via MoE with few active parameters