Qwen: Qwen3.6 27B vs Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Qwen: Qwen3.6 27B | Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | qwen | qwen |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 65.8 | 31.3 |
| Input Price | $0.32/M | $0.17/M |
| Output Price | $3.20/M | $0.25/M |
| Context Window | 262,144 | 262,144 |
| Max Output | 81,920 | 235,929 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 61.1 | 35.4 |
| ai_index_agentic | 44.6 | 12.2 |
| ai_index_coding | 88.6 | 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 Qwen3.6 27B costs $1.12, so Qwen3.5-9B is about 4.8 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 Qwen3.6 27B leads 65.8 to 31.3.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Qwen3.6 27B scores higher on 19 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others), Qwen3.5-9B on 1 (Code Completion).
Qwen3.6 27B was released in April 2026 and Qwen3.5-9B in March 2026.
Pick Qwen3.6 27B if you need benchmark performance or the stronger all-round task scores; pick Qwen3.5-9B if you need lower cost.
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: Qwen3.6 27B | Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 159 | 145 |
| Code Review | 152 | 139 |
| Code Completion | 129 | 129 |
| Code Refactoring | 148 | 138 |
| Bug Fixing | 162 | 145 |
| Unit Test Generation | 144 | 133 |
| Code Documentation | 134 | 130 |
| Regex Writing | 131 | 126 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 135 | 126 |
| Frontend Component Design | 140 | 131 |
| Data Analysis | 158 | 140 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 145 | 137 |
| ETL Scripting | 142 | 132 |
| JSON Extraction | 145 | 139 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 133 | 132 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 141 | 135 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 141 | 135 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 145 | 138 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 129 | 127 |
| Blog Post Writing | 132 | 126 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →