Qwen Chat

Alibaba's free assistant for chat, documents and images, strongest in Chinese-language work and built on one of the leading open-weight model families.

Assistants & chat Apps

Checked 25 Sep 2026

Open chat.qwen.ai

What you'd use it for

Getting a frontier-grade AI assistant, image generator and video generator for free, without a subscription or credit card.

Upload a contract, spreadsheet or long report and ask direct questions about its contents
Generate an image from a text description, then edit it with a follow-up prompt
Turn a text prompt or a still photo into a short video clip with synchronised audio
Ask questions about a photo or screenshot and get a plain-language answer back
Switch on Hybrid Thinking Mode for a slower, more careful answer on a harder question

The verdict

Qwen Chat is one of the more capable free assistants available, pairing Alibaba's well-regarded open-weight models with real image and video generation, long-document handling, and no subscription tier standing between you and them. It is missing the agent scaffolding - scheduled tasks, connected inboxes, a coding agent - that other assistants now build around their chat products, so it reads more as a strong chat window than a co-worker. It suits a business wanting to compare model quality or generate images and short clips on a budget more than one looking to automate a workflow around it, and usage limits plus where the data lives are the trade-offs for the free access.

What it costs

Tier	Price	For	Includes
Free	$0	Anyone wanting a capable assistant with no subscription.	Chat, document upload, image understanding, multilingual conversation.

Read from Qwen Chat's own pricing page on 25 Sep 2026. Vendors change prices without notice.

What you need to start

An email address to create a chat.qwen.ai account

A few minutes to a working account and a first answer, using nothing but an email address.

Your first run Register with just an email address, then ask a real question - Qwen answers directly in the chat window within a couple of minutes, no credit card or waiting list.

Where it breaks

No paid tier or pricing page was found at chat.qwen.ai or chat.qwen.ai/pricing — both resolve to the same free chat interface with no separate plans listed. This entry reflects a genuinely free consumer product rather than an unverified price; a reader wanting the underlying Qwen models for their own application should look at Alibaba Cloud's Model Studio API pricing instead, which is a separate, metered product.

Browser app with QR-code login for a mobile companion app. No desktop app found at the time of this check.

First entry in this reference. There is no previous check to compare it against.

When not to use it

Any business that must keep regulated or sensitive data - legal, healthcare, financial, government - out of Chinese jurisdiction should not use this for real work: Qwen's privacy policy states that user input is processed and stored in Singapore and mainland China by Alibaba Cloud entities, which rules out most EU GDPR-bound organisations and US government contractors by policy alone.

Qwen is Alibaba’s model family, and Qwen Chat is the free consumer front end for it — no subscription tier, no paywall between you and the current model generation, which is unusual among the assistants competing with ChatGPT and Claude at this point. What you’re trading for free access is less certain usage limits and a product built primarily for a Chinese-speaking audience, even though the interface and models handle English and other languages well.

The models themselves are a genuine reason to pay attention regardless of language: Qwen’s open-weight releases routinely rank near the top of independent leaderboards, which is why developers who want to self-host or fine-tune a model, rather than just chat with one, often start their search with Qwen rather than a closed US lab’s weights.

Document handling and image understanding are built in, so it functions like a general assistant rather than a narrow chat toy — upload a contract, ask questions about a photo, hold a long research conversation. What it does not have, at least not surfaced anywhere in the product during this check, is the agent-tool bundle — scheduled tasks, connected mailboxes, a coding agent — that Kimi and the Western labs have built out around their chat products.

For a business already paying for DeepSeek or another free-tier Chinese assistant, the reason to also try Qwen is model diversity: different labs’ models disagree in useful ways, and free costs nothing to compare.

Alternatives

Assistants & chatApps

ChatGPT

OpenAI's assistant in a browser tab, a desktop app and a phone app, where you ask questions, draft text, and hand it files or spreadsheets to work through.

Checked 25 Sep 2026

Assistants & chatModel

Claude

Anthropic's AI assistant, available in a browser tab and — the part that matters here — as a desktop app that can read the files on your own machine and reach the systems you connect to it.

Checked 15 Sep 2026