Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B vs OpenAI: GPT-5.3-Codex
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B | OpenAI: GPT-5.3-Codex | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | qwen | openai |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 31.3 | 73.4 |
| Input Price | $0.17/M | $1.75/M |
| Output Price | $0.25/M | $14.00/M |
| Context Window | 262,144 | 400,000 |
| Max Output | 235,929 | 128,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 35.4 | 73.0 |
| ai_index_agentic | 12.2 | - |
| ai_index_coding | 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-5.3-Codex costs $5.25, so Qwen3.5-9B is about 22.6 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 Qwen3.5-9B.
Only Qwen3.5-9B offers video input.
On our blended benchmark score GPT-5.3-Codex leads 73.4 to 31.3.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Qwen3.5-9B scores higher on 12 (SQL Generation, Code Completion, Unit Test Generation and others), GPT-5.3-Codex on 8 (Code Review, Code Refactoring, Bug Fixing and others).
Qwen3.5-9B was released in March 2026 and GPT-5.3-Codex in February 2026.
Pick Qwen3.5-9B if you need lower cost or video input; pick GPT-5.3-Codex if you need long documents or 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 | OpenAI: GPT-5.3-Codex |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 145 | 141 |
| Code Review | 139 | 145 |
| Code Completion | 129 | 118 |
| Code Refactoring | 138 | 147 |
| Bug Fixing | 145 | 149 |
| Unit Test Generation | 133 | 132 |
| Code Documentation | 130 | 135 |
| Regex Writing | 126 | 124 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 126 | 128 |
| Frontend Component Design | 131 | 130 |
| Data Analysis | 140 | 134 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 137 | 135 |
| ETL Scripting | 132 | 138 |
| JSON Extraction | 139 | 120 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 132 | 117 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 135 | 134 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 135 | 134 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 138 | 148 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 127 | 116 |
| Blog Post Writing | 126 | 129 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →