Compare / Muse Glimmer 30B vs Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B

Muse Glimmer 30B vs Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B

Updated November 2026

Verdict

Muse Glimmer 30B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 70.1 vs 34.9. On the 5 benchmarks both labs report, Muse Glimmer 30B wins 5 and Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B wins 0. Both need about 20.4 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization. Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B is cheaper through an API: $0.12 per million tokens against $0.53.

Pick Muse Glimmer 30B if…

you want the strongest model overall
you mostly write code
you need math and reasoning
you need precise instruction following
you need image input

Pick Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B if…

API cost matters most
you work with long documents
you want the more widely used model (more quantized builds and community support)

Specifications

	Muse Glimmer 30B	Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B
Small LM Index	70.1 (likely 69–72)	34.9 (likely 32–38)
Lab	Meta · United States	Alibaba (Qwen) · China
Released	2026-08-09	2025-07-31
Parameters	29.6B (dense)	30.5B (3.3B active, MoE)
Memory at 4-bit	~19.2 GB	~20.4 GB
Context window	131K tokens	262K tokens
Input	text, image	text
Reasoning	Always thinks	No thinking
License	Apache-2.0	Apache-2.0
API price / 1M tokens	$0.53 ($0.30 in, $1.20 out)	$0.12 ($0.070 in, $0.28 out)
Hugging Face downloads (30 days)	187.5K	1.3M

Benchmarks

Higher is better. Bold marks the winner where both labs report a score. ≈ marks the index model's estimate for a score that wasn't reported, ✓ an independent measurement and * a score measured by another lab.

Benchmark	Muse Glimmer 30B	Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B
MMLU-Pro Knowledge	≈ 86	70.6^✓
GPQA Diamond Knowledge	83.5^✓	51.6^✓
Humanity's Last Exam Reasoning	22.0^✓	3.8^✓
AIME Math	94.7	29.7^✓
LiveCodeBench Coding	≈ 84	40.3^✓
SWE-bench Verified Coding	76.0	51.6
Terminal-Bench Agentic	51.7	—
τ²-Bench Agentic	—	34.5^✓
IFBench Instruction following	77.0	32.7^✓
MMMU-Pro Vision	74.0	—
MATH-500 Math	—	89.3^✓
AA-LCR Long context	—	32.7^✓

Scores are mostly reported by each lab with its own settings, so small gaps are noise. See the methodology. Open in the interactive comparison to add more models.

Questions

Which is better, Muse Glimmer 30B or Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B?

Muse Glimmer 30B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 70.1 vs 34.9. On the 5 benchmarks both labs report, Muse Glimmer 30B wins 5 and Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B wins 0.

Which is cheaper to run?

Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B is cheaper through an API: $0.12 per million tokens against $0.53. Both need about 20.4 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization.

Which has the longer context window?

Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B has the longer context window: 262K tokens against 131K.

Can I use Muse Glimmer 30B and Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B commercially?

Both are released under the Apache-2.0 license. Apache 2.0 and MIT allow commercial use; other licenses can add conditions, so read the license before shipping a product.