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Crush vs Qwen Code

A side-by-side comparison of Crush and Qwen Code, two IDE tools, drawn from Ignaite's continuously-verified listings.

Compared from listings verified as of

Crush

IDE

Charm's glamorous agentic AI coding agent for your terminal.

View Crush

Qwen Code

IDE

Open-source AI coding agent that lives in your terminal.

View Qwen Code

At a glance

Feature comparison of Crush and Qwen Code
AttributeCrushQwen Code
CategoryIDEIDE
Pricing (differs)BYO KEYFREEMIUM
License (differs)ProprietaryOpen core
DeploymentLocalLocal
Platforms (differs)CLI, macOS, Linux, WindowsCLI
Model support (differs)BYO key / modelMulti-model
Vendor (differs)CharmAlibaba

The honest brief

Crush

Charm's signature TUI polish over a model-agnostic terminal agent: switch providers mid-session and keep code, keys, and data on your own machine.

  • Polished, keyboard-driven terminal UI
  • BYO keys for many providers
  • LSP-aware code context
  • Runs locally; you control keys and data
  • Requires your own model API keys
  • Beta — some features still missing
  • FSL license is not OSI open-source yet

Qwen Code

Parser and prompts tuned for Qwen3-Coder, with a free Qwen OAuth tier and native multi-provider support out of the box.

  • Apache-2.0 and free to run
  • Interactive or headless terminal UI
  • Multi-provider + local models
  • Agentic: subagents, MCP, memory
  • Best results need Qwen models
  • Younger than Gemini CLI upstream
  • Terminal-only workflow