head-to-head

Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B vs Qwen: Qwen3.5-35B-A3B

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

Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B Qwen: Qwen3.5-35B-A3B
Vendorqwenqwen
Quality Score100100
Benchmark Score52.947.9
Input Price$0.10/M$0.14/M
Output Price$0.90/M$1.00/M
Context Window262,144262,144
Max Output235,92981,920
Tool Calling✓✓
Structured Output✓✓
Reasoning Mode✓✓
Vision✓✓
Audio--
Benchmark Scores
ai_index52.248.3
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 Qwen3.5-35B-A3B costs $0.39, so Qwen3.6 35B A3B is about 1.2 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 47.9.

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 Qwen3.5-35B-A3B in February 2026.

Pick Qwen3.6 35B A3B if you need lower cost, 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 A3BQwen: Qwen3.5-35B-A3B
SQL Generation 154 136
Code Review 147 135
Code Completion 130 130
Code Refactoring 144 135
Bug Fixing 156 139
Unit Test Generation 140 127
Code Documentation 133 130
Regex Writing 129 124
CI/CD Pipelines 132 123
Frontend Component Design 137 127
Data Analysis 151 131
CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup 141 130
ETL Scripting 138 129
JSON Extraction 143 131
Bulk Data Labeling 133 129
OCR / Document Parsing 138 130
Table Extraction from PDFs 138 130
Long-Document Summarization 142 137
Short-Form Summarization 128 126
Blog Post Writing 130 124

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

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