The closest alternative to Qwen3 8B is LFM2-24B-A2B — comparable intelligence (10.5 vs 10.6); for a cheaper option, Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) runs Free/M vs $0.050/M; for more speed, gpt-oss-120b (free) hits 554 t/s; and the best open-weight substitute is MiniMax M3.
LFM2-24B-A2B is the closest alternative to Qwen3 8B, with an Intelligence Index of 10.5 (Qwen3 8B scores 10.6) at $0.030 per million input tokens.
Yes — Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) costs Free per million input tokens versus $0.050 for Qwen3 8B, while staying within ~8 points of its Intelligence Index.
MiniMax M3 is the strongest open-weight alternative to Qwen3 8B — downloadable from Hugging Face and self-hostable, scoring 54.7 on intelligence.