head-to-head

Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B vs Google: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools

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

Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B Google: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools
Vendorqwengoogle
Quality Score100100
Benchmark Score52.9-
Input Price$0.10/M$2.00/M
Output Price$0.90/M$12.00/M
Context Window262,1441,048,576
Max Output235,92965,536
Tool Calling✓✓
Structured Output✓✓
Reasoning Mode✓✓
Vision✓✓
Audio-✓
Benchmark Scores
ai_index52.2-
ai_index_agentic35.3-
ai_index_coding69.1-

The verdict

For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Qwen3.6 35B A3B costs $0.33 and Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools costs $5.00, so Qwen3.6 35B A3B is about 15.4 times cheaper for the same work.

Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools reads up to 1,048,576 tokens at once, roughly 1,573 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Qwen3.6 35B A3B.

Only Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools offers audio input.

Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Qwen3.6 35B A3B scores higher on 20 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Completion and others).

Qwen3.6 35B A3B was released in April 2026 and Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools in February 2026.

Pick Qwen3.6 35B A3B if you need lower cost or the stronger all-round task scores; pick Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools if you need long documents or audio input.

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 35B A3BGoogle: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools
SQL Generation 154 132
Code Review 147 132
Code Completion 130 117
Code Refactoring 144 136
Bug Fixing 156 136
Unit Test Generation 140 124
Code Documentation 133 129
Regex Writing 129 117
CI/CD Pipelines 132 120
Frontend Component Design 137 122
Data Analysis 151 124
CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup 141 132
ETL Scripting 138 128
JSON Extraction 143 121
Bulk Data Labeling 133 117
OCR / Document Parsing 138 131
Table Extraction from PDFs 138 131
Long-Document Summarization 142 136
Short-Form Summarization 128 113
Blog Post Writing 130 120

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

Related comparisons

Anthropic: Claude Haiku Latest vs Google: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools Anthropic: Claude Haiku Latest vs Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5 vs Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B Anthropic: Claude Sonnet Latest vs Google: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools Anthropic: Claude Sonnet Latest vs Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B ByteDance Seed: Seed-2.0-Lite vs Google: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools ByteDance Seed: Seed-2.0-Mini vs Google: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview vs Google: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Custom Tools

The Model Movers Report

One email every Friday, built from this site's own rankings: the current top five by benchmark score, every model released in the last seven days, and one note worked out from that week's numbers. You can unsubscribe from any issue with one click.