OpenAI: GPT-5.4 Mini vs Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| OpenAI: GPT-5.4 Mini | Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | openai | qwen |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 70.8 | 31.3 |
| Input Price | $0.75/M | $0.17/M |
| Output Price | $4.50/M | $0.25/M |
| Context Window | 400,000 | 262,144 |
| Max Output | 128,000 | 235,929 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 66.0 | 35.4 |
| ai_index_agentic | 49.8 | 12.2 |
| ai_index_coding | 92.5 | 47.3 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Qwen3.5-9B costs $0.23 and GPT-5.4 Mini costs $1.88, so Qwen3.5-9B is about 8.1 times cheaper for the same work.
GPT-5.4 Mini reads up to 400,000 tokens at once, roughly 600 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Qwen3.5-9B.
Only Qwen3.5-9B offers video input.
On our blended benchmark score GPT-5.4 Mini leads 70.8 to 31.3.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, GPT-5.4 Mini scores higher on 20 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Completion and others).
Pick GPT-5.4 Mini if you need long documents, benchmark performance or the stronger all-round task scores; pick Qwen3.5-9B 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 | OpenAI: GPT-5.4 Mini | Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 164 | 145 |
| Code Review | 159 | 139 |
| Code Completion | 132 | 129 |
| Code Refactoring | 158 | 138 |
| Bug Fixing | 170 | 145 |
| Unit Test Generation | 148 | 133 |
| Code Documentation | 140 | 130 |
| Regex Writing | 132 | 126 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 139 | 126 |
| Frontend Component Design | 141 | 131 |
| Data Analysis | 160 | 140 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 151 | 137 |
| ETL Scripting | 149 | 132 |
| JSON Extraction | 146 | 139 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 133 | 132 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 144 | 135 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 144 | 135 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 154 | 138 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 129 | 127 |
| Blog Post Writing | 136 | 126 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →