head-to-head

Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B vs OpenAI: GPT-5.4

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

Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B OpenAI: GPT-5.4
Vendorqwenopenai
Quality Score100100
Benchmark Score52.989.6
Input Price$0.10/M$2.50/M
Output Price$0.90/M$15.00/M
Context Window262,1441,050,000
Max Output235,929128,000
Tool Calling✓✓
Structured Output✓✓
Reasoning Mode✓✓
Vision✓✓
Audio--
Benchmark Scores
ai_index52.284.8
ai_index_agentic35.367.8
ai_index_coding69.1100.0
eqbench-75.6

The verdict

For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Qwen3.6 35B A3B costs $0.33 and GPT-5.4 costs $6.25, so Qwen3.6 35B A3B is about 19.2 times cheaper for the same work.

GPT-5.4 reads up to 1,050,000 tokens at once, roughly 1,575 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Qwen3.6 35B A3B.

Only Qwen3.6 35B A3B offers video input.

On our blended benchmark score GPT-5.4 leads 89.6 to 52.9.

Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Qwen3.6 35B A3B scores higher on 4 (Code Completion, JSON Extraction, Bulk Data Labeling and others), GPT-5.4 on 16 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).

Qwen3.6 35B A3B was released in April 2026 and GPT-5.4 in March 2026.

Pick Qwen3.6 35B A3B if you need lower cost or video input; pick GPT-5.4 if you need long documents, 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 35B A3BOpenAI: GPT-5.4
SQL Generation 154 174
Code Review 147 175
Code Completion 130 120
Code Refactoring 144 173
Bug Fixing 156 187
Unit Test Generation 140 158
Code Documentation 133 146
Regex Writing 129 136
CI/CD Pipelines 132 149
Frontend Component Design 137 148
Data Analysis 151 173
CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup 141 157
ETL Scripting 138 161
JSON Extraction 143 137
Bulk Data Labeling 133 122
OCR / Document Parsing 138 148
Table Extraction from PDFs 138 148
Long-Document Summarization 142 167
Short-Form Summarization 128 122
Blog Post Writing 130 143

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

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