MiniMax: MiniMax M3 vs Qwen: Qwen3.5-35B-A3B
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| MiniMax: MiniMax M3 | Qwen: Qwen3.5-35B-A3B | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | minimax | qwen |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 78.0 | 47.9 |
| Input Price | $0.30/M | $0.14/M |
| Output Price | $1.20/M | $1.00/M |
| Context Window | 1,048,576 | 262,144 |
| Max Output | 512,000 | 81,920 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 73.3 | 48.3 |
| ai_index_agentic | 58.3 | - |
| ai_index_coding | 96.6 | - |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Qwen3.5-35B-A3B costs $0.39 and MiniMax M3 costs $0.60, so Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is about 1.5 times cheaper for the same work.
MiniMax M3 reads up to 1,048,576 tokens at once, roughly 1,573 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Qwen3.5-35B-A3B.
On our blended benchmark score MiniMax M3 leads 78.0 to 47.9.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, MiniMax M3 scores higher on 20 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Completion and others).
MiniMax M3 was released in May 2026 and Qwen3.5-35B-A3B in February 2026.
Pick MiniMax M3 if you need long documents, benchmark performance or the stronger all-round task scores; pick Qwen3.5-35B-A3B if you need lower cost.
Costs use current list prices per million tokens; page counts assume about 0.75 words per token and 500 words per page.
Who wins by task?
| Task | MiniMax: MiniMax M3 | Qwen: Qwen3.5-35B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 167 | 136 |
| Code Review | 162 | 135 |
| Code Completion | 133 | 130 |
| Code Refactoring | 160 | 135 |
| Bug Fixing | 173 | 139 |
| Unit Test Generation | 151 | 127 |
| Code Documentation | 142 | 130 |
| Regex Writing | 134 | 124 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 141 | 123 |
| Frontend Component Design | 143 | 127 |
| Data Analysis | 164 | 131 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 153 | 130 |
| ETL Scripting | 151 | 129 |
| JSON Extraction | 147 | 131 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 135 | 129 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 145 | 130 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 145 | 130 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 156 | 137 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 131 | 126 |
| Blog Post Writing | 138 | 124 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →