Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B vs Google: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B | Google: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | qwen | |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 31.3 | 74.7 |
| Input Price | $0.17/M | $2.00/M |
| Output Price | $0.25/M | $12.00/M |
| Context Window | 262,144 | 1,048,576 |
| Max Output | 235,929 | 65,536 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | ✓ |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 35.4 | 76.7 |
| ai_index_agentic | 12.2 | 35.3 |
| ai_index_coding | 47.3 | 100.0 |
| eqbench | - | 64.7 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Qwen3.5-9B costs $0.23 and Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview costs $5.00, so Qwen3.5-9B is about 21.5 times cheaper for the same work.
Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview reads up to 1,048,576 tokens at once, roughly 1,573 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Qwen3.5-9B.
Only Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview offers audio input.
On our blended benchmark score Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview leads 74.7 to 31.3.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Qwen3.5-9B scores higher on 4 (Code Completion, JSON Extraction, Bulk Data Labeling and others), Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview on 16 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
Qwen3.5-9B was released in March 2026 and Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview in February 2026.
Pick Qwen3.5-9B if you need lower cost; pick Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview if you need long documents, audio input, 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: Qwen3.5-9B | Google: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 145 | 168 |
| Code Review | 139 | 168 |
| Code Completion | 129 | 120 |
| Code Refactoring | 138 | 168 |
| Bug Fixing | 145 | 177 |
| Unit Test Generation | 133 | 154 |
| Code Documentation | 130 | 144 |
| Regex Writing | 126 | 133 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 126 | 145 |
| Frontend Component Design | 131 | 145 |
| Data Analysis | 140 | 164 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 137 | 155 |
| ETL Scripting | 132 | 156 |
| JSON Extraction | 139 | 137 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 132 | 123 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 135 | 147 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 135 | 147 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 138 | 163 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 127 | 121 |
| Blog Post Writing | 126 | 140 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →