Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B vs Qwen: Qwen3.5-35B-A3B
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B | Qwen: Qwen3.5-35B-A3B | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | qwen | qwen |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 31.3 | 47.9 |
| Input Price | $0.17/M | $0.14/M |
| Output Price | $0.25/M | $1.00/M |
| Context Window | 262,144 | 262,144 |
| Max Output | 235,929 | 81,920 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 35.4 | 48.3 |
| 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 Qwen3.5-35B-A3B costs $0.39, so Qwen3.5-9B is about 1.7 times cheaper for the same work.
Both read up to 262,144 tokens at once, roughly 393 pages of text.
On our blended benchmark score Qwen3.5-35B-A3B leads 47.9 to 31.3.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Qwen3.5-9B scores higher on 19 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others), Qwen3.5-35B-A3B on 1 (Code Completion).
Qwen3.5-9B was released in March 2026 and Qwen3.5-35B-A3B in February 2026.
Pick Qwen3.5-9B if you need lower cost or the stronger all-round task scores; pick Qwen3.5-35B-A3B 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 | Qwen: Qwen3.5-35B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 145 | 136 |
| Code Review | 139 | 135 |
| Code Completion | 129 | 130 |
| Code Refactoring | 138 | 135 |
| Bug Fixing | 145 | 139 |
| Unit Test Generation | 133 | 127 |
| Code Documentation | 130 | 130 |
| Regex Writing | 126 | 124 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 126 | 123 |
| Frontend Component Design | 131 | 127 |
| Data Analysis | 140 | 131 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 137 | 130 |
| ETL Scripting | 132 | 129 |
| JSON Extraction | 139 | 131 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 132 | 129 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 135 | 130 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 135 | 130 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 138 | 137 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 127 | 126 |
| Blog Post Writing | 126 | 124 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →