Thinking Machines: Inkling Small vs Qwen: Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Thinking Machines: Inkling Small | Qwen: Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | thinkingmachines | qwen |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Input Price | $0.45/M | $0.30/M |
| Output Price | $1.20/M | $1.80/M |
| Context Window | 524,288 | 1,000,000 |
| Max Output | 262,144 | 65,536 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | - | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | ✓ | - |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, both cost $0.75 at current list prices.
Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 reads up to 1,000,000 tokens at once, roughly 1,500 pages of text, against about 786 pages for Inkling Small.
Only Inkling Small offers audio input; only Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 offers structured output and video input.
Across the 17 tasks where they differ, Inkling Small scores higher on 4 (Code Completion, Code Documentation, Regex Writing and others), Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 on 13 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
Inkling Small was released in July 2026 and Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 in April 2026.
Pick Inkling Small if you need audio input; pick Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 if you need long documents, structured output, video input 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 | Thinking Machines: Inkling Small | Qwen: Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 125 | 133 |
| Code Review | 128 | 132 |
| Code Completion | 131 | 131 |
| Code Refactoring | 132 | 136 |
| Unit Test Generation | 116 | 124 |
| Code Documentation | 131 | 131 |
| Regex Writing | 119 | 119 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 116 | 120 |
| Frontend Component Design | 118 | 122 |
| Data Analysis | 120 | 124 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 121 | 133 |
| ETL Scripting | 124 | 128 |
| JSON Extraction | 119 | 131 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 125 | 129 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 123 | 131 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 123 | 131 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 123 | 123 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →