Model comparison
Grok-3 mini vs Qwen3.6 27B
Grok-3 mini and Qwen3.6 27B score almost the same on the Noometry Index (41.0 vs 41.9), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.
Last verified . 3 shared benchmarks.
Summary
- They share 3 benchmarks with published results for both. Grok-3 mini scores higher in 2 categories and Qwen3.6 27B in 3 categories; 5 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Qwen3.6 27B leads 24.4 to 13.8.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025: 77.8% for Grok-3 mini and 91.1% for Qwen3.6 27B.
- Qwen3.6 27B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Grok-3 mini | Qwen3.6 27B | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | xAI | Alibaba (Qwen) |
| Noometry Index | 41.0 | 41.9 |
| Released | 2025-04-09 | 2026-04-22 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |
| Context window | — | 262K |
| Max output | — | 66K |
| Input $ / M tokens | — | $0.60 |
| Output $ / M tokens | — | $3.60 |
| Results tracked | 35 | 11 |
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Category by category
Coding Grok-3 mini leads
Grok-3 mini: 40.4 (#126), Qwen3.6 27B: 38.5 (#162)
| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| Aider Polyglot | 49.3% | — |
| SciCode | — | 37.3% |
| WeirdML | 42.6% | — |
| LMArena Coding | 1380 | — |
Reasoning Qwen3.6 27B leads
Grok-3 mini: 13.8 (#323), Qwen3.6 27B: 24.4 (#148)
| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 140.35 | 146.47 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 0.4% | — |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 61.3% | — |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 16.5% | — |
| CritPt | — | 0.9% |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 22% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1374 | — |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | — | 7% |
| DTBench | — | 78.1% |
| LMCA | — | 34.5% |
Math Qwen3.6 27B leads
Grok-3 mini: 40.3 (#78), Qwen3.6 27B: 47.5 (#56)
| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 77.8% | 91.1% |
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | — | 35.1% |
| Omni-MATH | 31.8% | — |
| LMArena Math | 1386 | — |
| MATH Level 5 | 90.9% | — |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 5.9% | — |
Knowledge Qwen3.6 27B leads
Grok-3 mini: 46.3 (#75), Qwen3.6 27B: 52.4 (#58)
| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 76.3% | 85.9% |
| MMLU-Pro | 79.9% | — |
| Confabulations | 10.8% | — |
| GPQA (HELM) | 67.5% | — |
| LMArena Expert | 1395 | — |
Multilingual Not comparable
Grok-3 mini: 48.3 (#141), Qwen3.6 27B: —
| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1352 | — |
| LMArena Chinese | 1387 | — |
| LMArena French | 1357 | — |
| LMArena German | 1350 | — |
| LMArena Japanese | 1343 | — |
| LMArena Korean | 1336 | — |
| LMArena Russian | 1352 | — |
| LMArena Spanish | 1379 | — |
Instruction Following Not comparable
Grok-3 mini: 78.7 (#8), Qwen3.6 27B: —
| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| IFEval | 95.1% | — |
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1356 | — |
Long Context Not comparable
Grok-3 mini: 41.0 (#142), Qwen3.6 27B: —
| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| Fiction.LiveBench | 66.7% | — |
| LMArena Longer Query | 1372 | — |
Writing & Preference Grok-3 mini leads
Grok-3 mini: 52.7 (#163), Qwen3.6 27B: 50.3 (#180)
| Benchmark | Grok-3 mini | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1370 | — |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1342 | — |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | 73.5% | — |
| WildBench | 65.1% | — |
| EQ-Bench 4 | — | 1026 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1355 | — |
Frequently asked questions
Is Grok-3 mini better than Qwen3.6 27B?
Grok-3 mini and Qwen3.6 27B score almost the same on the Noometry Index (41.0 vs 41.9), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.
Is Grok-3 mini or Qwen3.6 27B better for coding?
Grok-3 mini scores higher on coding benchmarks: 40.4 versus 38.5 in the Noometry coding category.
How many benchmarks do Grok-3 mini and Qwen3.6 27B share?
3 benchmarks have published results for both models. Grok-3 mini has 35 scored results on Noometry and Qwen3.6 27B has 11.