Model comparison
Grok-3 mini vs Qwen3.5 35B-A3B
Grok-3 mini and Qwen3.5 35B-A3B score almost the same on the Noometry Index (41.0 vs 41.7), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.
Last verified . 20 shared benchmarks.
Summary
- They share 20 benchmarks with published results for both. Grok-3 mini scores higher in 3 categories and Qwen3.5 35B-A3B in 5 categories; 8 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Qwen3.5 35B-A3B leads 23.9 to 13.8.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025: 77.8% for Grok-3 mini and 70% for Qwen3.5 35B-A3B.
- Qwen3.5 35B-A3B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Grok-3 mini | Qwen3.5 35B-A3B | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | xAI | Alibaba (Qwen) |
| Noometry Index | 41.0 | 41.7 |
| Released | 2025-04-09 | 2026-02-01 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |
| Context window | — | 262K |
| Max output | — | 66K |
| Input $ / M tokens | — | $0.25 |
| Output $ / M tokens | — | $2 |
| Results tracked | 35 | 28 |
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Category by category
Coding Grok-3 mini leads
Grok-3 mini: 40.4 (#126), Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 33.5 (#244)
| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Qwen3.5 35B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1380 | 1410 |
| Aider Polyglot | 49.3% | — |
| LMArena WebDev | — | 1254 |
| SciCode | — | 29.3% |
| WeirdML | 42.6% | — |
Reasoning Qwen3.5 35B-A3B leads
Grok-3 mini: 13.8 (#323), Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 23.9 (#158)
| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Qwen3.5 35B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1374 | 1400 |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 140.35 | 142.52 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 0.4% | — |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 61.3% | — |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 16.5% | — |
| CritPt | — | 0.6% |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 10% |
| DTBench | — | 80% |
| LMCA | — | 29.5% |
Math Grok-3 mini leads
Grok-3 mini: 40.3 (#78), Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 38.4 (#86)
| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Qwen3.5 35B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 77.8% | 70% |
| LMArena Math | 1386 | 1404 |
| MathArena Final-Answer Competitions | — | 56% |
| Omni-MATH | 31.8% | — |
| MATH Level 5 | 90.9% | — |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 5.9% | — |
Knowledge Qwen3.5 35B-A3B leads
Grok-3 mini: 46.3 (#75), Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 47.7 (#73)
| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Qwen3.5 35B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 76.3% | 83.5% |
| LMArena Expert | 1395 | 1408 |
| MMLU-Pro | 79.9% | — |
| Confabulations | 10.8% | — |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 10.5% |
| GPQA (HELM) | 67.5% | — |
Multilingual Qwen3.5 35B-A3B leads
Grok-3 mini: 48.3 (#141), Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 50.2 (#122)
| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Qwen3.5 35B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1352 | 1379 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1387 | 1458 |
| LMArena French | 1357 | 1412 |
| LMArena German | 1350 | 1367 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1343 | 1326 |
| LMArena Korean | 1336 | 1354 |
| LMArena Russian | 1352 | 1377 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1379 | 1390 |
Instruction Following Grok-3 mini leads
Grok-3 mini: 78.7 (#8), Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 73.0 (#123)
| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Qwen3.5 35B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1356 | 1379 |
| IFEval | 95.1% | — |
Long Context Qwen3.5 35B-A3B leads
Grok-3 mini: 41.0 (#142), Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 42.4 (#122)
| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Qwen3.5 35B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1372 | 1390 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | 66.7% | — |
Writing & Preference Qwen3.5 35B-A3B leads
Grok-3 mini: 52.7 (#163), Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 58.1 (#118)
| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Qwen3.5 35B-A3B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1370 | 1395 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1342 | 1347 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1355 | 1391 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | 73.5% | — |
| WildBench | 65.1% | — |
Frequently asked questions
Is Grok-3 mini better than Qwen3.5 35B-A3B?
Grok-3 mini and Qwen3.5 35B-A3B score almost the same on the Noometry Index (41.0 vs 41.7), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.
Is Grok-3 mini or Qwen3.5 35B-A3B better for coding?
Grok-3 mini scores higher on coding benchmarks: 40.4 versus 33.5 in the Noometry coding category.
How many benchmarks do Grok-3 mini and Qwen3.5 35B-A3B share?
20 benchmarks have published results for both models. Grok-3 mini has 35 scored results on Noometry and Qwen3.5 35B-A3B has 28.