Mistral: Mistral Medium 3.5 vs Qwen: Qwen3.5-27B
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Mistral: Mistral Medium 3.5 | Qwen: Qwen3.5-27B | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | mistralai | qwen |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 53.0 | 55.6 |
| Input Price | $1.50/M | $0.26/M |
| Output Price | $7.50/M | $2.60/M |
| Context Window | 262,144 | 262,144 |
| Max Output | 209,715 | 81,920 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 49.4 | 55.7 |
| ai_index_agentic | 31.3 | - |
| ai_index_coding | 77.4 | - |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Qwen3.5-27B costs $0.91 and Mistral Medium 3.5 costs $3.38, so Qwen3.5-27B is about 3.7 times cheaper for the same work.
Both read up to 262,144 tokens at once, roughly 393 pages of text.
Only Qwen3.5-27B offers video input.
On our blended benchmark score Qwen3.5-27B leads 55.6 to 53.0.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Mistral Medium 3.5 scores higher on 17 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others), Qwen3.5-27B on 3 (Code Completion, Bulk Data Labeling, Short-Form Summarization).
Mistral Medium 3.5 was released in April 2026 and Qwen3.5-27B in February 2026.
Pick Mistral Medium 3.5 if you need the stronger all-round task scores; pick Qwen3.5-27B if you need lower cost, video input or benchmark performance.
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 | Mistral: Mistral Medium 3.5 | Qwen: Qwen3.5-27B |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 153 | 137 |
| Code Review | 147 | 137 |
| Code Completion | 116 | 129 |
| Code Refactoring | 144 | 136 |
| Bug Fixing | 155 | 141 |
| Unit Test Generation | 140 | 127 |
| Code Documentation | 131 | 130 |
| Regex Writing | 128 | 125 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 132 | 123 |
| Frontend Component Design | 137 | 128 |
| Data Analysis | 151 | 132 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 142 | 130 |
| ETL Scripting | 138 | 130 |
| JSON Extraction | 134 | 131 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 123 | 129 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 139 | 131 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 139 | 131 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 141 | 138 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 119 | 126 |
| Blog Post Writing | 129 | 125 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →