Model comparison
Codestral vs Qwen3.5 35B-A3B
Qwen3.5 35B-A3B is the stronger model overall, scoring 42.0 to 30.6 on the Noometry Index. Codestral costs 1.5× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Qwen3.5 35B-A3B's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Last verified . 0 shared benchmarks.
Mistral AI
Alibaba (Qwen)Summary
- The widest gap is in coding, where Qwen3.5 35B-A3B leads 33.8 to 27.3.
- Codestral is cheaper at $0.30 / $0.90 per million input/output tokens, against $0.25 / $2 for Qwen3.5 35B-A3B.
- Qwen3.5 35B-A3B accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 256K.
- Qwen3.5 35B-A3B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Codestral | Qwen3.5 35B-A3B | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | Alibaba (Qwen) |
| Noometry Index | 30.6 | 42.0 |
| Released | 2024-05-29 | 2026-02-01 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |
| Context window | 256K | 262K |
| Max output | 8K | 66K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $0.30 | $0.25 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $0.90 | $2 |
| Results tracked | 7 | 28 |
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Category by category
Coding Qwen3.5 35B-A3B leads
Codestral: 27.3 (#321), Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 33.8 (#251)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3.5 35B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| Aider Polyglot | 11.1% | — |
| LMArena WebDev | — | 1254 |
| SciCode | — | 29.3% |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 41.8% | — |
| LMArena Coding | — | 1410 |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 52.5% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 137.78 | — |
| HumanEval+ | 73.8% | — |
| MBPP+ | 61.9% | — |
Reasoning Qwen3.5 35B-A3B leads
Codestral: 19.8 (#251), Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 24.6 (#161)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3.5 35B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 32.5% | — |
| CritPt | — | 0.6% |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 10% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | — | 1400 |
| DTBench | — | 80% |
| LMCA | — | 29.5% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 142.52 |
Math Not comparable
Codestral: —, Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 39.9 (#97)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3.5 35B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| MathArena Final-Answer Competitions | — | 56% |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 70% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1404 |
Knowledge Not comparable
Codestral: —, Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 47.8 (#79)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3.5 35B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | — | 83.5% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 10.5% |
| LMArena Expert | — | 1408 |
Multilingual Not comparable
Codestral: —, Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 50.0 (#127)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3.5 35B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | — | 1378 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1457 |
| LMArena French | — | 1412 |
| LMArena German | — | 1367 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1325 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1356 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1376 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1392 |
Instruction Following Not comparable
Codestral: —, Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 72.8 (#128)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3.5 35B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | — | 1379 |
Long Context Not comparable
Codestral: —, Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 42.4 (#127)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3.5 35B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1389 |
Writing & Preference Not comparable
Codestral: —, Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 57.9 (#124)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3.5 35B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | — | 1395 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | — | 1346 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | — | 1390 |
Frequently asked questions
Is Codestral better than Qwen3.5 35B-A3B?
Qwen3.5 35B-A3B is the stronger model overall, scoring 42.0 to 30.6 on the Noometry Index. Codestral costs 1.5× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Qwen3.5 35B-A3B's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Which is cheaper, Codestral or Qwen3.5 35B-A3B?
Codestral is cheaper. It lists at $0.30 per million input tokens and $0.90 per million output tokens; Qwen3.5 35B-A3B lists at $0.25 and $2.
Is Codestral or Qwen3.5 35B-A3B better for coding?
Qwen3.5 35B-A3B scores higher on coding benchmarks: 33.8 versus 27.3 in the Noometry coding category.
Which has the bigger context window?
Qwen3.5 35B-A3B does, with 262K tokens against 256K.
How many benchmarks do Codestral and Qwen3.5 35B-A3B share?
0 benchmarks have published results for both models. Codestral has 7 scored results on Noometry and Qwen3.5 35B-A3B has 28.