Qwen: Qwen3.8 27B vs SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-09-30.
| Qwen: Qwen3.8 27B | SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | qwen | x-ai |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 55.6 | 75.3 |
| Input Price | $0.42/M | $2.00/M |
| Output Price | $3.00/M | $6.00/M |
| Context Window | 1,000,000 | 500,000 |
| Max Output | 131,072 | 450,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 55.6 | 73.1 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Qwen3.8 27B costs $1.17 and Grok 4.6 costs $3.50, so Qwen3.8 27B is about 3.0 times cheaper for the same work.
Qwen3.8 27B reads up to 1,000,000 tokens at once, roughly 1,500 pages of text, against about 750 pages for Grok 4.6.
Only Qwen3.8 27B offers video input.
On our blended benchmark score Grok 4.6 leads 75.3 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), Grok 4.6 on 16 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
Pick Qwen3.8 27B if you need lower cost, long documents or video input; pick Grok 4.6 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?
| Task | Qwen: Qwen3.8 27B | SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 140 | 142 |
| Code Review | 142 | 145 |
| Code Completion | 132 | 119 |
| Code Refactoring | 144 | 147 |
| Bug Fixing | 146 | 149 |
| Unit Test Generation | 130 | 132 |
| Code Documentation | 136 | 137 |
| Regex Writing | 124 | 125 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 126 | 128 |
| Frontend Component Design | 128 | 130 |
| Data Analysis | 132 | 135 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 135 | 136 |
| ETL Scripting | 135 | 138 |
| 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 | 130 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →