The closest alternative to Qwen3 Coder Next is Mercury 2 — comparable intelligence (21.4 vs 21.1); for a cheaper option, GPT-5.6 Luna runs $0.100/M vs $0.120/M; and the best open-weight substitute is Kimi K3.
Mercury 2 is the closest alternative to Qwen3 Coder Next, with an Intelligence Index of 21.4 (Qwen3 Coder Next scores 21.1) at $0.250 per million input tokens.
Yes — GPT-5.6 Luna costs $0.100 per million input tokens versus $0.120 for Qwen3 Coder Next, while staying within ~8 points of its Intelligence Index.
Kimi K3 is the strongest open-weight alternative to Qwen3 Coder Next — downloadable from Hugging Face and self-hostable, scoring 57.1 on intelligence.