head-to-head

Qwen: Qwen3.6 27B vs MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6

Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.

Qwen: Qwen3.6 27B MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6
Vendorqwenmoonshotai
Quality Score100100
Benchmark Score65.876.7
Input Price$0.32/M$0.65/M
Output Price$3.20/M$3.41/M
Context Window262,144262,144
Max Output81,920235,929
Tool Calling✓✓
Structured Output✓✓
Reasoning Mode✓✓
Vision✓✓
Audio--
Benchmark Scores
ai_index61.173.0
ai_index_agentic44.649.9
ai_index_coding88.6100.0
eqbench-63.5

The verdict

For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Qwen3.6 27B costs $1.12 and Kimi K2.6 costs $1.50, so Qwen3.6 27B is about 1.3 times cheaper for the same work.

Both read up to 262,144 tokens at once, roughly 393 pages of text.

Only Qwen3.6 27B offers video input.

On our blended benchmark score Kimi K2.6 leads 76.7 to 65.8.

Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Kimi K2.6 on 20 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Completion and others).

Pick Qwen3.6 27B if you need lower cost or video input; pick Kimi K2.6 if you need 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?

TaskQwen: Qwen3.6 27BMoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6
SQL Generation 159 168
Code Review 152 164
Code Completion 129 131
Code Refactoring 148 160
Bug Fixing 162 174
Unit Test Generation 144 152
Code Documentation 134 140
Regex Writing 131 136
CI/CD Pipelines 135 142
Frontend Component Design 140 145
Data Analysis 158 166
CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup 145 151
ETL Scripting 142 151
JSON Extraction 145 147
Bulk Data Labeling 133 134
OCR / Document Parsing 141 144
Table Extraction from PDFs 141 144
Long-Document Summarization 145 156
Short-Form Summarization 129 131
Blog Post Writing 132 139

Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →

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