head-to-head

Qwen: Qwen3.8 27B vs OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Terra (batch)

Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-09-30.

Qwen: Qwen3.8 27B OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Terra (batch)
Vendorqwenopenai
Quality Score100100
Benchmark Score55.671.1
Input Price$0.42/M$1.00/M
Output Price$3.00/M$6.00/M
Context Window1,000,0001,050,000
Max Output131,072128,000
Tool Calling✓✓
Structured Output✓✓
Reasoning Mode✓✓
Vision✓✓
Audio--
Benchmark Scores
ai_index55.669.4

The verdict

For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Qwen3.8 27B costs $1.17 and GPT-5.6 Terra (batch) costs $2.50, so Qwen3.8 27B is about 2.1 times cheaper for the same work.

Both take in a similar amount of text: 1,000,000 and 1,050,000 tokens, about 1,500 and 1,575 pages.

Only Qwen3.8 27B offers video input.

On our blended benchmark score GPT-5.6 Terra (batch) leads 71.1 to 55.6.

Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Qwen3.8 27B scores higher on 4 (Code Completion, JSON Extraction, Bulk Data Labeling and others), GPT-5.6 Terra (batch) on 16 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).

Qwen3.8 27B was released in August 2026 and GPT-5.6 Terra (batch) in July 2026.

Pick Qwen3.8 27B if you need lower cost or video input; pick GPT-5.6 Terra (batch) 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: Qwen3.8 27BOpenAI: GPT-5.6 Terra (batch)
SQL Generation 140 141
Code Review 142 145
Code Completion 132 120
Code Refactoring 144 147
Bug Fixing 146 149
Unit Test Generation 130 132
Code Documentation 136 136
Regex Writing 124 125
CI/CD Pipelines 126 128
Frontend Component Design 128 130
Data Analysis 132 134
CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup 135 136
ETL Scripting 135 137
JSON Extraction 131 122
Bulk Data Labeling 129 119
OCR / Document Parsing 133 134
Table Extraction from PDFs 133 134
Long-Document Summarization 146 148
Short-Form Summarization 126 118
Blog Post Writing 128 129

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

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