Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B vs MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.5
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B | MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | qwen | moonshotai |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 31.3 | 64.3 |
| Input Price | $0.17/M | $0.53/M |
| Output Price | $0.25/M | $3.33/M |
| Context Window | 262,144 | 262,144 |
| Max Output | 235,929 | 65,536 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 35.4 | 62.9 |
| ai_index_agentic | 12.2 | - |
| ai_index_coding | 47.3 | - |
| eqbench | - | 55.2 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Qwen3.5-9B costs $0.23 and Kimi K2.5 costs $1.36, so Qwen3.5-9B is about 5.9 times cheaper for the same work.
Both read up to 262,144 tokens at once, roughly 393 pages of text.
Only Qwen3.5-9B offers video input.
On our blended benchmark score Kimi K2.5 leads 64.3 to 31.3.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Qwen3.5-9B scores higher on 8 (SQL Generation, Unit Test Generation, Data Analysis and others), Kimi K2.5 on 12 (Code Review, Code Completion, Code Refactoring and others).
Qwen3.5-9B was released in March 2026 and Kimi K2.5 in January 2026.
Pick Qwen3.5-9B if you need lower cost or video input; pick Kimi K2.5 if you need benchmark performance.
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 | MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.5 |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 145 | 142 |
| Code Review | 139 | 145 |
| Code Completion | 129 | 131 |
| Code Refactoring | 138 | 145 |
| Bug Fixing | 145 | 149 |
| Unit Test Generation | 133 | 132 |
| Code Documentation | 130 | 135 |
| Regex Writing | 126 | 127 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 126 | 128 |
| Frontend Component Design | 131 | 131 |
| Data Analysis | 140 | 136 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 137 | 133 |
| ETL Scripting | 132 | 136 |
| JSON Extraction | 139 | 131 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 132 | 128 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 135 | 133 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 135 | 133 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 138 | 146 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 127 | 127 |
| Blog Post Writing | 126 | 130 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →