The closest alternative to Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking is Nova Premier 1.0 — comparable intelligence (19.0 vs 19.7); for a cheaper option, Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) runs Free/M vs $0.130/M; for more speed, gpt-oss-120b (free) hits 554 t/s; and the best open-weight substitute is MiniMax M3.
Nova Premier 1.0 is the closest alternative to Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking, with an Intelligence Index of 19.0 (Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking scores 19.7) at $2.50 per million input tokens.
Yes — Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) costs Free per million input tokens versus $0.130 for Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking, while staying within ~8 points of its Intelligence Index.
MiniMax M3 is the strongest open-weight alternative to Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking — downloadable from Hugging Face and self-hostable, scoring 54.7 on intelligence.