Thinking Machines: Inkling Small vs Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Thinking Machines: Inkling Small | Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | thinkingmachines | qwen |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | - | 52.9 |
| Input Price | $0.45/M | $0.10/M |
| Output Price | $1.20/M | $0.90/M |
| Context Window | 524,288 | 262,144 |
| Max Output | 262,144 | 235,929 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | - | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | ✓ | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | - | 52.2 |
| ai_index_agentic | - | 35.3 |
| ai_index_coding | - | 69.1 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Qwen3.6 35B A3B costs $0.33 and Inkling Small costs $0.75, so Qwen3.6 35B A3B is about 2.3 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 35B A3B.
Only Inkling Small offers audio input; only Qwen3.6 35B A3B offers structured output and video input.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Inkling Small scores higher on 1 (Code Completion), Qwen3.6 35B A3B on 19 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
Inkling Small was released in July 2026 and Qwen3.6 35B A3B in April 2026.
Pick Inkling Small if you need long documents or audio input; pick Qwen3.6 35B A3B if you need lower cost, 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 35B A3B |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 125 | 154 |
| Code Review | 128 | 147 |
| Code Completion | 131 | 130 |
| Code Refactoring | 132 | 144 |
| Bug Fixing | 136 | 156 |
| Unit Test Generation | 116 | 140 |
| Code Documentation | 131 | 133 |
| Regex Writing | 119 | 129 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 116 | 132 |
| Frontend Component Design | 118 | 137 |
| Data Analysis | 120 | 151 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 121 | 141 |
| ETL Scripting | 124 | 138 |
| JSON Extraction | 119 | 143 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 125 | 133 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 123 | 138 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 123 | 138 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 137 | 142 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 123 | 128 |
| Blog Post Writing | 121 | 130 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →