xAI: Grok Latest vs Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| xAI: Grok Latest | Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | ~x-ai | qwen |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 10.9 | 31.3 |
| Input Price | $2.00/M | $0.17/M |
| Output Price | $6.00/M | $0.25/M |
| Context Window | 500,000 | 262,144 |
| Max Output | 450,000 | 235,929 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 12.4 | 35.4 |
| ai_index_agentic | - | 12.2 |
| ai_index_coding | - | 47.3 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Qwen3.5-9B costs $0.23 and Grok Latest costs $3.50, so Qwen3.5-9B is about 15.1 times cheaper for the same work.
Grok Latest reads up to 500,000 tokens at once, roughly 750 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Qwen3.5-9B.
Only Qwen3.5-9B offers video input.
On our blended benchmark score Qwen3.5-9B leads 31.3 to 10.9.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Grok Latest scores higher on 2 (Code Documentation, Long-Document Summarization), Qwen3.5-9B on 18 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Completion and others).
Grok Latest was released in July 2026 and Qwen3.5-9B in March 2026.
Pick Grok Latest if you need long documents; pick Qwen3.5-9B if you need lower cost, video input, 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 | xAI: Grok Latest | Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 134 | 145 |
| Code Review | 134 | 139 |
| Code Completion | 118 | 129 |
| Code Refactoring | 138 | 138 |
| Bug Fixing | 138 | 145 |
| Unit Test Generation | 125 | 133 |
| Code Documentation | 131 | 130 |
| Regex Writing | 119 | 126 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 121 | 126 |
| Frontend Component Design | 123 | 131 |
| Data Analysis | 125 | 140 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 133 | 137 |
| ETL Scripting | 129 | 132 |
| JSON Extraction | 122 | 139 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 119 | 132 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 131 | 135 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 131 | 135 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 139 | 138 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 115 | 127 |
| Blog Post Writing | 122 | 126 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →