Qwen2.5 72B Instruct vs Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base
Comparing Qwen2.5 72B Instruct and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base across benchmarks, pricing, and capabilities.
Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team · Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team · Updated for 2026
Which is better?
Qwen2.5 72B Instruct and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base trade strengths across price, capabilities, and technical limits. The better choice depends on the workload.
Based on current LLM Stats indexes, shared benchmarks, pricing, and model metadata for 2026.
Choose Qwen2.5 72B Instruct
- you want predictable pricing at $0.35/M input and $0.40/M output
Choose Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base
- you want the most recent training data — it shipped Sep 2025
At a glance
The differences that matter most.
Individual benchmarks
14 reported for Qwen2.5 72B Instruct · 0 for Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base
Qwen2.5 72B Instruct and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Basedon't have any common benchmark datasets to compare. They may have been evaluated on different testing suites.
Human preference
Blind head-to-head votes and playground preference scores
Model Size
Parameter count comparison
Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base has 7.3B more parameters than Qwen2.5 72B Instruct, making it 10.0% larger.
Context Window
Maximum input and output token capacity
Only Qwen2.5 72B Instruct specifies input context (131,072 tokens). Only Qwen2.5 72B Instruct specifies output context (8,192 tokens).
License
Usage and distribution terms
Qwen2.5 72B Instruct is licensed under Qwen, while Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base uses Apache 2.0.
License differences may affect how you can use these models in commercial or open-source projects.
Qwen
Open weights
Apache 2.0
Open weights
Release Timeline
When each model was launched
Qwen2.5 72B Instruct was released on 2024-09-19, while Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base was released on 2025-09-10.
Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base is 12 months newer than Qwen2.5 72B Instruct.
Sep 19, 2024
2.0 years ago
Sep 10, 2025
1.0 years ago
11mo newerKnowledge 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 Qwen2.5 72B Instruct and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base side-by-side, then vote on the output you prefer.
FAQ
Common questions about Qwen2.5 72B Instruct vs Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base.