Mistral: Mistral Medium 3.5 vs Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Mistral: Mistral Medium 3.5 | Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | mistralai | qwen |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 53.0 | 52.9 |
| Input Price | $1.50/M | $0.10/M |
| Output Price | $7.50/M | $0.90/M |
| Context Window | 262,144 | 262,144 |
| Max Output | 209,715 | 235,929 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 49.4 | 52.2 |
| ai_index_agentic | 31.3 | 35.3 |
| ai_index_coding | 77.4 | 69.1 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Qwen3.6 35B A3B costs $0.33 and Mistral Medium 3.5 costs $3.38, so Qwen3.6 35B A3B is about 10.4 times cheaper for the same work.
Both read up to 262,144 tokens at once, roughly 393 pages of text.
Only Qwen3.6 35B A3B offers video input.
Across the 18 tasks where they differ, Mistral Medium 3.5 scores higher on 8 (Unit Test Generation, CI/CD Pipelines, Frontend Component Design and others), Qwen3.6 35B A3B on 10 (SQL Generation, Code Completion, Bug Fixing and others).
Pick Qwen3.6 35B A3B if you need lower cost or video input.
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: Qwen3.6 35B A3B |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 153 | 154 |
| Code Completion | 116 | 130 |
| Bug Fixing | 155 | 156 |
| Unit Test Generation | 140 | 140 |
| Code Documentation | 131 | 133 |
| Regex Writing | 128 | 129 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 132 | 132 |
| Frontend Component Design | 137 | 137 |
| Data Analysis | 151 | 151 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 142 | 141 |
| ETL Scripting | 138 | 138 |
| JSON Extraction | 134 | 143 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 123 | 133 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 139 | 138 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 139 | 138 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 141 | 142 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 119 | 128 |
| Blog Post Writing | 129 | 130 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →