MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 vs Qwen: Qwen3.5-Flash
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 | Qwen: Qwen3.5-Flash | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | moonshotai | qwen |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 76.7 | - |
| Input Price | $0.65/M | $0.07/M |
| Output Price | $3.41/M | $0.26/M |
| Context Window | 262,144 | 1,000,000 |
| Max Output | 235,929 | 65,536 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 73.0 | - |
| ai_index_agentic | 49.9 | - |
| ai_index_coding | 100.0 | - |
| eqbench | 63.5 | - |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Qwen3.5-Flash costs $0.13 and Kimi K2.6 costs $1.50, so Qwen3.5-Flash is about 11.6 times cheaper for the same work.
Qwen3.5-Flash reads up to 1,000,000 tokens at once, roughly 1,500 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Kimi K2.6.
Only Qwen3.5-Flash offers video input.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Kimi K2.6 scores higher on 19 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others), Qwen3.5-Flash on 1 (Code Completion).
Kimi K2.6 was released in April 2026 and Qwen3.5-Flash in February 2026.
Pick Kimi K2.6 if you need the stronger all-round task scores; pick Qwen3.5-Flash if you need lower cost, long documents 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 | MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6 | Qwen: Qwen3.5-Flash |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 168 | 134 |
| Code Review | 164 | 132 |
| Code Completion | 131 | 131 |
| Code Refactoring | 160 | 136 |
| Bug Fixing | 174 | 136 |
| Unit Test Generation | 152 | 124 |
| Code Documentation | 140 | 131 |
| Regex Writing | 136 | 119 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 142 | 120 |
| Frontend Component Design | 145 | 122 |
| Data Analysis | 166 | 124 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 151 | 134 |
| ETL Scripting | 151 | 128 |
| JSON Extraction | 147 | 131 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 134 | 129 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 144 | 131 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 144 | 131 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 156 | 138 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 131 | 123 |
| Blog Post Writing | 139 | 122 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →