Alibaba's Qwen-Image-2.1 Announced as Fully Open-Source with Day-One ComfyUI Support

Alibaba's Tongyi team, together with ModelScope, officially announced that Qwen-Image-2.1, the latest generation of the Qwen-Image text-to-image model, will be open-sourced: after a 10-hour countdown, both weights and code would be released for download, local running, and downstream development. On the same day, a related PR was merged into ComfyUI and an official Comfy page went live, making ecosystem support nearly simultaneous with the release.

Confirmed

• The Tongyi team and ModelScope's official accounts jointly teased the open-sourcing of Qwen-Image-2.1, with weights and code downloadable for self-deployment (m4, m5)
• Reddit user CeFurkan posted a 10-hour countdown pointing to the public open-source release (m2, m3)
• The related PR was merged into ComfyUI with a YouTube video showing various generation examples; Reddit user fruesome flagged the imminent release based on this (m1)
• Comfy's official page comfy.org/qwen-image-2.1 is live, confirming upcoming ComfyUI workflow support (m7)

Timeline

• 09-20: LiteBlackEagle surfaced the "Qwen/Qwen-Image-2.1" naming clue, sparking speculation (m6)
• 09-20: fruesome found the merged ComfyUI PR and reported the release was coming the next day (m1)
• 09-20: Tongyi and ModelScope officially announced the countdown; weights and code in 10 hours (m4, m5)
• 09-20: Comfy's official page went live (m7)

Why it matters

• Qwen-Image is one of the mainstream open-source text-to-image model families; version 2.1 ships with both weights and code, enabling direct local deployment and secondary development
• Day-one ComfyUI integration and an official support page mean ecosystem adaptation is nearly synchronized with the release, so users can put the model to work in real workflows immediately

2026-09-20 ~ 2026-09-20 · 7 related posts

Full story(10 episodes)→

• Episode 1: Qwen Image 2.1 open-source model appears set for release(2026-09-18, 2 posts)
• Episode 2: Early Qwen Image 2.1 hands-on reports split: fast and good at editing, weak photorealism(2026-09-19, 7 posts)
• Episode 3: Alibaba's Qwen-Image-2.1 Announced as Fully Open-Source with Day-One ComfyUI Support(2026-09-20, 7 posts)
• Episode 4: Qwen Releases Prompt-Rewriting Models for Image Generation(2026-09-20, 2 posts)
• Episode 5: Qwen Image Model Beats Flux in Quality and Speed, Users Report(2026-09-20, 4 posts)
• Episode 6: Alibaba Open-Sources Qwen-Image-2.1: One 7B Model for Image Generation and Editing(2026-09-20, 36 posts)
• Episode 7: Qwen Image 2.1 Tested: Strong Text Rendering, Yellowish Tones(2026-09-21, 2 posts)
• Episode 8: Qwen-Image 2.1 Lands on SGLang with 2.55x Speedup from KV Cache(2026-09-21, 2 posts)
• Episode 9: Qwen-Image-2.1 GGUF Quantized Version Tops Hugging Face Trending(2026-09-21, 4 posts)
• Episode 10: Unsloth's quantized Qwen-Image-2.1 runs locally on just 6GB VRAM(2026-09-21, 2 posts)

• Qwen Image 2.1 support coming soon to ComfyUI — Time-Teaching1926 · 2026-09-20
• [source] Qwen Image 2.1 dropping tomorrow as PR merges into ComfyUI — fruesome · 2026-09-20
• [source] Qwen-Image-2.1 going open source with weights and code, countdown begins — realmrfakename · 2026-09-20
• Qwen Image 2.1 open-source release counted down to hours away — CeFurkan · 2026-09-20
• Qwen-Image-2.1 Spotted: Alibaba's Next Image Model Possibly Imminent — LiteBlackEagle · 2026-09-20

2 near-duplicate retellings: CeFurkan · multimodalart