Noometry

Model comparison

Grok-3 mini vs Qwen3.5 27B

Grok-3 mini and Qwen3.5 27B score almost the same on the Noometry Index (41.0 vs 41.4), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

Last verified . 18 shared benchmarks.

Grok-3 mini xAI

41.0

Rank #130 Confirmed

Qwen3.5 27B Alibaba (Qwen)

41.4

Rank #127 Confirmed

Summary

  • They share 18 benchmarks with published results for both. Grok-3 mini scores higher in 4 categories and Qwen3.5 27B in 4 categories; 8 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in reasoning, where Qwen3.5 27B leads 26.6 to 13.8.
  • Qwen3.5 27B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

Side by side

Grok-3 miniQwen3.5 27B
ProviderxAIAlibaba (Qwen)
Noometry Index41.041.4
Released2025-04-092026-02-23
WeightsProprietaryOpen
Context window—262K
Max output—66K
Input $ / M tokens—$0.30
Output $ / M tokens—$2.40
Results tracked3528

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Category by category

Coding Grok-3 mini leads

Grok-3 mini: 40.4 (#126), Qwen3.5 27B: 38.6 (#159)

BenchmarkGrok-3 miniQwen3.5 27B
WeirdML42.6%39.5%
LMArena Coding13801427
Aider Polyglot49.3%—
LMArena WebDev—1357
ALE-Bench—349.45

Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable

Grok-3 mini: —, Qwen3.5 27B: —

BenchmarkGrok-3 miniQwen3.5 27B
Vending-Bench 2—201.98

Reasoning Qwen3.5 27B leads

Grok-3 mini: 13.8 (#323), Qwen3.5 27B: 26.6 (#116)

BenchmarkGrok-3 miniQwen3.5 27B
LMArena Hard Prompts13741414
ARC-AGI-20.4%—
Kagi LLM Benchmark61.3%—
NYT Connections (extended)—47.9%
ARC-AGI-116.5%—
Thematic Generalization—45.5%
DTBench—82.4%
LMCA—34%
Epoch Capabilities Index140.35—

Math Grok-3 mini leads

Grok-3 mini: 40.3 (#78), Qwen3.5 27B: 36.8 (#103)

BenchmarkGrok-3 miniQwen3.5 27B
LMArena Math13861428
MathArena Final-Answer Competitions—56.7%
OTIS Mock AIME 2024-202577.8%—
Omni-MATH31.8%—
MATH Level 590.9%—
FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set)5.9%—

Knowledge Grok-3 mini leads

Grok-3 mini: 46.3 (#75), Qwen3.5 27B: 37.4 (#149)

BenchmarkGrok-3 miniQwen3.5 27B
LMArena Expert13951428
GPQA Diamond76.3%—
MMLU-Pro79.9%—
Confabulations10.8%—
Vectara Hallucination Rate—12.1%
GPQA (HELM)67.5%—

Multimodal Not comparable

Grok-3 mini: —, Qwen3.5 27B: 38.7 (#56)

BenchmarkGrok-3 miniQwen3.5 27B
LMArena Vision—1240

Multilingual Qwen3.5 27B leads

Grok-3 mini: 48.3 (#141), Qwen3.5 27B: 51.0 (#112)

BenchmarkGrok-3 miniQwen3.5 27B
LMArena Non-English13521390
LMArena Chinese13871478
LMArena French13571409
LMArena German13501393
LMArena Japanese13431345
LMArena Korean13361359
LMArena Russian13521389
LMArena Spanish13791408

Instruction Following Grok-3 mini leads

Grok-3 mini: 78.7 (#8), Qwen3.5 27B: 73.7 (#114)

BenchmarkGrok-3 miniQwen3.5 27B
LMArena Instruction Following13561393
IFEval95.1%—

Long Context Qwen3.5 27B leads

Grok-3 mini: 41.0 (#142), Qwen3.5 27B: 43.1 (#103)

BenchmarkGrok-3 miniQwen3.5 27B
LMArena Longer Query13721413
Fiction.LiveBench66.7%—

Writing & Preference Qwen3.5 27B leads

Grok-3 mini: 52.7 (#163), Qwen3.5 27B: 59.5 (#106)

BenchmarkGrok-3 miniQwen3.5 27B
LMArena Text13701409
LMArena Creative Writing13421362
LMArena Multi-Turn13551410
Short-Story Creative Writing73.5%—
WildBench65.1%—

Frequently asked questions

Is Grok-3 mini better than Qwen3.5 27B?

Grok-3 mini and Qwen3.5 27B score almost the same on the Noometry Index (41.0 vs 41.4), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

Is Grok-3 mini or Qwen3.5 27B better for coding?

Grok-3 mini scores higher on coding benchmarks: 40.4 versus 38.6 in the Noometry coding category.

How many benchmarks do Grok-3 mini and Qwen3.5 27B share?

18 benchmarks have published results for both models. Grok-3 mini has 35 scored results on Noometry and Qwen3.5 27B has 28.

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