Qwen: Qwen3.5-35B-A3B vs OpenAI: GPT-5.3-Codex
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Qwen: Qwen3.5-35B-A3B | OpenAI: GPT-5.3-Codex | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | qwen | openai |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 47.9 | 73.4 |
| Input Price | $0.14/M | $1.75/M |
| Output Price | $1.00/M | $14.00/M |
| Context Window | 262,144 | 400,000 |
| Max Output | 81,920 | 128,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 48.3 | 73.0 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Qwen3.5-35B-A3B costs $0.39 and GPT-5.3-Codex costs $5.25, so Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is about 13.5 times cheaper for the same work.
GPT-5.3-Codex reads up to 400,000 tokens at once, roughly 600 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Qwen3.5-35B-A3B.
Only Qwen3.5-35B-A3B offers video input.
On our blended benchmark score GPT-5.3-Codex leads 73.4 to 47.9.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Qwen3.5-35B-A3B scores higher on 5 (Code Completion, Regex Writing, JSON Extraction and others), GPT-5.3-Codex on 15 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
Pick Qwen3.5-35B-A3B if you need lower cost or video input; pick GPT-5.3-Codex if you need long documents, benchmark performance or the stronger all-round task scores.
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 | Qwen: Qwen3.5-35B-A3B | OpenAI: GPT-5.3-Codex |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 136 | 141 |
| Code Review | 135 | 145 |
| Code Completion | 130 | 118 |
| Code Refactoring | 135 | 147 |
| Bug Fixing | 139 | 149 |
| Unit Test Generation | 127 | 132 |
| Code Documentation | 130 | 135 |
| Regex Writing | 124 | 124 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 123 | 128 |
| Frontend Component Design | 127 | 130 |
| Data Analysis | 131 | 134 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 130 | 135 |
| ETL Scripting | 129 | 138 |
| JSON Extraction | 131 | 120 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 129 | 117 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 130 | 134 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 130 | 134 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 137 | 148 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 126 | 116 |
| Blog Post Writing | 124 | 129 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →