Thinking Machines: Inkling Small vs Qwen: Qwen3.6 27B
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Thinking Machines: Inkling Small | Qwen: Qwen3.6 27B | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | thinkingmachines | qwen |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | - | 65.8 |
| Input Price | $0.45/M | $0.32/M |
| Output Price | $1.20/M | $3.20/M |
| Context Window | 524,288 | 262,144 |
| Max Output | 262,144 | 81,920 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | - | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | ✓ | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | - | 61.1 |
| ai_index_agentic | - | 44.6 |
| ai_index_coding | - | 88.6 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Inkling Small costs $0.75 and Qwen3.6 27B costs $1.12, so Inkling Small is about 1.5 times cheaper for the same work.
Inkling Small reads up to 524,288 tokens at once, roughly 786 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Qwen3.6 27B.
Only Inkling Small offers audio input; only Qwen3.6 27B offers structured output and video input.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Inkling Small scores higher on 1 (Code Completion), Qwen3.6 27B on 19 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
Inkling Small was released in July 2026 and Qwen3.6 27B in April 2026.
Pick Inkling Small if you need lower cost, long documents or audio input; pick Qwen3.6 27B if you need 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: Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 125 | 159 |
| Code Review | 128 | 152 |
| Code Completion | 131 | 129 |
| Code Refactoring | 132 | 148 |
| Bug Fixing | 136 | 162 |
| Unit Test Generation | 116 | 144 |
| Code Documentation | 131 | 134 |
| Regex Writing | 119 | 131 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 116 | 135 |
| Frontend Component Design | 118 | 140 |
| Data Analysis | 120 | 158 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 121 | 145 |
| ETL Scripting | 124 | 142 |
| JSON Extraction | 119 | 145 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 125 | 133 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 123 | 141 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 123 | 141 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 137 | 145 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 123 | 129 |
| Blog Post Writing | 121 | 132 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →