Kimi K2-Instruct-0905 vs Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct
Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct significantly outperforms across most benchmarks.
Moonshot AI · Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team · Updated for 2026
Which is better?
Kimi K2-Instruct-0905 outperforms in 0 benchmarks, while Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct is better at 3 benchmarks (Aider-Polyglot, SWE-bench Multilingual, SWE-Bench Verified). Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct significantly outperforms across most benchmarks.
Based on current benchmark, pricing, and model metadata for 2026.
Choose Kimi K2-Instruct-0905
- you want the most recent training data — it shipped Sep 2025
Choose Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct
- you want the strongest raw capability — it leads on 3 of 3 shared benchmarks
At a glance
The differences that matter most.
Performance Benchmarks
Comparative analysis across standard metrics
Kimi K2-Instruct-0905 outperforms in 0 benchmarks, while Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct is better at 3 benchmarks (Aider-Polyglot, SWE-bench Multilingual, SWE-Bench Verified).
Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct significantly outperforms across most benchmarks.
Arena Performance
Playground indexes and blind preference scores
Model Size
Parameter count comparison
Kimi K2-Instruct-0905 has 520.0B more parameters than Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct, making it 108.3% larger.
License
Usage and distribution terms
Kimi K2-Instruct-0905 is licensed under MIT, while Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct uses Apache 2.0.
License differences may affect how you can use these models in commercial or open-source projects.
MIT
Open weights
Apache 2.0
Open weights
Release Timeline
When each model was launched
Kimi K2-Instruct-0905 was released on 2025-09-05, while Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct was released on 2025-01-31.
Kimi K2-Instruct-0905 is 7 months newer than Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct.
Sep 5, 2025
11 months ago
7mo newerJan 31, 2025
1.6 years ago
Knowledge Cutoff
When training data ends
Neither model specifies a knowledge cutoff date.
Unable to compare the recency of their training data.
Outputs Comparison
Judge for yourself.
Run your own prompts against Kimi K2-Instruct-0905 and Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct side-by-side, then vote on the output you prefer.
FAQ
Common questions about Kimi K2-Instruct-0905 vs Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct.