head-to-head

Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B vs Google: Gemma 4 26B A4B

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

Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B Google: Gemma 4 26B A4B
Vendorqwengoogle
Quality Score100100
Benchmark Score52.948.4
Input Price$0.10/M$0.07/M
Output Price$0.90/M$0.23/M
Context Window262,144262,144
Max Output235,929235,929
Tool Calling✓✓
Structured Output✓✓
Reasoning Mode✓✓
Vision✓✓
Audio--
Benchmark Scores
ai_index52.242.4
ai_index_agentic35.318.1
ai_index_coding69.164.9
eqbench-56.3

The verdict

For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Gemma 4 26B A4B costs $0.12 and Qwen3.6 35B A3B costs $0.33, so Gemma 4 26B A4B is about 2.6 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 35B A3B leads 52.9 to 48.4.

Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Qwen3.6 35B A3B scores higher on 5 (SQL Generation, Frontend Component Design, Data Analysis and others), Gemma 4 26B A4B on 15 (Code Review, Code Completion, Code Refactoring and others).

Pick Qwen3.6 35B A3B if you need benchmark performance; pick Gemma 4 26B A4B if you need lower cost 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 35B A3BGoogle: Gemma 4 26B A4B
SQL Generation 154 153
Code Review 147 150
Code Completion 130 131
Code Refactoring 144 148
Bug Fixing 156 156
Unit Test Generation 140 140
Code Documentation 133 136
Regex Writing 129 130
CI/CD Pipelines 132 133
Frontend Component Design 137 136
Data Analysis 151 148
CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup 141 143
ETL Scripting 138 141
JSON Extraction 143 142
Bulk Data Labeling 133 133
OCR / Document Parsing 138 138
Table Extraction from PDFs 138 138
Long-Document Summarization 142 147
Short-Form Summarization 128 129
Blog Post Writing 130 131

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

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