Qwen: Qwen3.8 27B vs MiniMax: MiniMax M3
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-09-30.
| Qwen: Qwen3.8 27B | MiniMax: MiniMax M3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | qwen | minimax |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 55.6 | 47.2 |
| Input Price | $0.42/M | $0.30/M |
| Output Price | $3.00/M | $1.20/M |
| Context Window | 1,000,000 | 1,048,576 |
| Max Output | 131,072 | 512,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 55.6 | 48.2 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, MiniMax M3 costs $0.60 and Qwen3.8 27B costs $1.17, so MiniMax M3 is about 1.9 times cheaper for the same work.
Both take in a similar amount of text: 1,000,000 and 1,048,576 tokens, about 1,500 and 1,573 pages.
On our blended benchmark score Qwen3.8 27B leads 55.6 to 47.2.
Across the 19 tasks where they differ, Qwen3.8 27B scores higher on 16 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others), MiniMax M3 on 3 (Code Completion, JSON Extraction, Bulk Data Labeling).
Qwen3.8 27B was released in August 2026 and MiniMax M3 in May 2026.
Pick Qwen3.8 27B if you need benchmark performance or the stronger all-round task scores; pick MiniMax M3 if you need lower cost.
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?
| Task | Qwen: Qwen3.8 27B | MiniMax: MiniMax M3 |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 140 | 139 |
| Code Review | 142 | 141 |
| Code Completion | 132 | 132 |
| Code Refactoring | 144 | 143 |
| Bug Fixing | 146 | 145 |
| Unit Test Generation | 130 | 129 |
| Code Documentation | 136 | 136 |
| Regex Writing | 124 | 124 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 126 | 125 |
| Frontend Component Design | 128 | 127 |
| Data Analysis | 132 | 131 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 135 | 135 |
| ETL Scripting | 135 | 134 |
| JSON Extraction | 131 | 131 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 129 | 129 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 133 | 133 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 133 | 133 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 146 | 145 |
| Blog Post Writing | 128 | 127 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →