Qwen Code: review, pricing, security and alternatives

What Qwen Code does

Qwen Code belongs to the coding agents family: they read a repository, edit files, run the tests and fix things until everything passes, in a terminal or an editor. On our grid it ranks #6 of the 74 projects of this family listed in the directory.

You use it from: terminal (CLI). Usable models: Qwen (Alibaba) and any OpenAI-compatible model. It can run on your own machine or server.

Who is Qwen Code for?

It is aimed at developers and technical teams who want to hand off part of the work on their codebase while keeping the final review. Typical tasks people give it:

• fix a bug from an issue or an error message
• write or extend tests
• migrate code to a new library version
• explain an unfamiliar codebase

It is a good candidate if you are comfortable in a terminal and your data must stay on your machines.

Access and human control

According to its documentation, Qwen Code can:

• run commands in a terminal
• read and edit files

By default it asks for your confirmation before sensitive actions (command, send, delete). Keep that setting, at least at first: full-auto mode saves time but removes the last safeguard.

Qwen Code pricing

The code is free, under the Apache-2.0 licence.

Getting started with Qwen Code

1. Install it: the project ships as a Node.js package (install with npm, or run directly with npx). The exact command is in the repository README.
2. Create an API key with the model provider and put it in an environment variable, never in a shared or versioned file.
3. Give it a first playground with nothing at stake: a test folder, a secondary account or a throwaway project. Only open your real accounts once you have seen how it behaves.
4. Give it a short, checkable task, review the result and its action log, then raise the difficulty step by step.

Security: risk level

A coding agent runs commands on your machine: work on a Git branch, review the changes and isolate it in a container for long tasks.

Points found for Qwen Code:

• Supervised sensitive access: it can act on the system, but asks for confirmation by default.

Three habits: least privilege (minimal rights, dedicated keys), human approval for irreversible actions, a sandbox for code execution. The AI agent security check reviews your setup in a few minutes.

Project activity and releases

Created on June 26, 2025, the QwenLM/qwen-code repository has 28,696 stars, 3,257 forks and 1,604 open issues, with 11,436 commits in total. It received changes this month.

Over the last 52 weeks: 12,772 commits, an average of 245.6 per week.

790 releases in total; 12 in the last twelve months. Latest release: v0.26.1, on October 24, 2026.

Qwen Code vs other coding agents

GitHub stars of the best-rated open-source projects in the coding agents family. Stars measure attention, not quality: a heavily promoted project collects them fast, a specialised tool will have few.

Qwen Code and other coding agents at a glance

The 7 best-ranked agents in the same family, 7 of them open source. The score out of 100 only applies to open-source projects; for proprietary services we show the published entry price. A dash marks information the documentation does not state.

How we rated it

Score: 89/100, computed only from public, verifiable data, with no subjective testing or partnership:

• Adoption 29/40: 28,696 stars on a log scale (40 points from about 200,000).
• Activity 30/30: last commit less than a month ago, 12 releases in six months, 12,772 commits in a year.
• Framework 30/30: licence, default human approval, self-hosting, model choice and documentation site.

The score does not say whether the agent will succeed at your tasks: it measures how solid the project is. The full grid is on the method page.