SmolLM3-3B
the fully-open lineage pick — apache 2.0 from hugging face, with think and no-think modes.
punches above its size on instruction following and comes from the one vendor here whose whole reason for existing is openness — with weaker long-context recall than the spec suggests.
76.7% on ifeval against qwen2.5-3b's 65.6% is a wide margin for instruction following at this size, and the dual think and no-think modes let you spend reasoning tokens only when a task warrants it. at roughly 2gb quantised it runs on anything, cpu included.
apache 2.0 with no conditions, from hugging face, which has a stronger institutional commitment to publishing training details than any commercial vendor on this page.
the description above is ours, condensed from the ranking. pricing moves — check it on the vendor's own page before you rely on it.
- category
- small on-device llms
- pricing
- free (apache 2.0)
- website
- huggingface.co
punches above its size on instruction following and comes from the one vendor here whose whole reason for existing is openness — with weaker long-context recall than the spec suggests.
we researched this category against vendors' own pricing pages and licence files. that is where this line comes from — not from the vendor, and not from anything they paid for.