head-to-head

Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B vs Qwen: Qwen3.6 27B

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

Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B Qwen: Qwen3.6 27B
Vendorqwenqwen
Quality Score100100
Benchmark Score52.965.8
Input Price$0.10/M$0.32/M
Output Price$0.90/M$3.20/M
Context Window262,144262,144
Max Output235,92981,920
Tool Calling✓✓
Structured Output✓✓
Reasoning Mode✓✓
Vision✓✓
Audio--
Benchmark Scores
ai_index52.261.1
ai_index_agentic35.344.6
ai_index_coding69.188.6

The verdict

For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Qwen3.6 35B A3B costs $0.33 and Qwen3.6 27B costs $1.12, so Qwen3.6 35B A3B is about 3.4 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 52.9.

Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Qwen3.6 35B A3B scores higher on 1 (Code Completion), Qwen3.6 27B on 19 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).

Pick Qwen3.6 35B A3B if you need lower cost; pick Qwen3.6 27B if you need 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: Qwen3.6 27B
SQL Generation 154 159
Code Review 147 152
Code Completion 130 129
Code Refactoring 144 148
Bug Fixing 156 162
Unit Test Generation 140 144
Code Documentation 133 134
Regex Writing 129 131
CI/CD Pipelines 132 135
Frontend Component Design 137 140
Data Analysis 151 158
CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup 141 145
ETL Scripting 138 142
JSON Extraction 143 145
Bulk Data Labeling 133 133
OCR / Document Parsing 138 141
Table Extraction from PDFs 138 141
Long-Document Summarization 142 145
Short-Form Summarization 128 129
Blog Post Writing 130 132

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

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