Qwen: Qwen3.8 27B vs MoonshotAI: Kimi K3
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-09-30.
| Qwen: Qwen3.8 27B | MoonshotAI: Kimi K3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | qwen | moonshotai |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 55.6 | 73.9 |
| Input Price | $0.42/M | $3.00/M |
| Output Price | $3.00/M | $15.00/M |
| Context Window | 1,000,000 | 1,048,576 |
| Max Output | 131,072 | 943,718 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 55.6 | 71.9 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Qwen3.8 27B costs $1.17 and Kimi K3 costs $6.75, so Qwen3.8 27B is about 5.8 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 Kimi K3 leads 73.9 to 55.6.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Qwen3.8 27B scores higher on 7 (Code Completion, Code Documentation, Regex Writing and others), Kimi K3 on 13 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
Qwen3.8 27B was released in August 2026 and Kimi K3 in July 2026.
Pick Qwen3.8 27B if you need lower cost; pick Kimi K3 if you need benchmark performance.
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 | MoonshotAI: Kimi K3 |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 140 | 140 |
| Code Review | 142 | 145 |
| Code Completion | 132 | 117 |
| Code Refactoring | 144 | 147 |
| Bug Fixing | 146 | 149 |
| Unit Test Generation | 130 | 132 |
| Code Documentation | 136 | 134 |
| Regex Writing | 124 | 123 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 126 | 128 |
| Frontend Component Design | 128 | 130 |
| Data Analysis | 132 | 134 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 135 | 135 |
| ETL Scripting | 135 | 138 |
| JSON Extraction | 131 | 120 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 129 | 116 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 133 | 134 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 133 | 134 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 146 | 147 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 126 | 116 |
| Blog Post Writing | 128 | 128 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →