Model comparison
Grok 3 vs Qwen3.5-9B
Grok 3 is the stronger model overall, scoring 39.9 to 33.8 on the Noometry Index.
Last verified . 3 shared benchmarks.
Alibaba (Qwen)Summary
- They share 3 benchmarks with published results for both. Grok 3 scores higher in 4 categories and Qwen3.5-9B in 1 category; 4 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in agentic & tool use, where Grok 3 leads 30.5 to 14.5.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025: 55.6% for Grok 3 and 61.7% for Qwen3.5-9B.
- Qwen3.5-9B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Grok 3 | Qwen3.5-9B | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | xAI | Alibaba (Qwen) |
| Noometry Index | 39.9 | 33.8 |
| Released | 2025-04-09 | 2026-02-23 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |
| Context window | — | 262K |
| Max output | — | 66K |
| Input $ / M tokens | — | $0.10 |
| Output $ / M tokens | — | $0.15 |
| Results tracked | 40 | 10 |
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Category by category
Coding Grok 3 leads
Grok 3: 41.9 (#115), Qwen3.5-9B: 35.9 (#217)
| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| Aider Polyglot | 53.3% | — |
| SciCode | — | 27.5% |
| WeirdML | 37.2% | — |
| LMArena Coding | 1432 | — |
Agentic & Tool Use Grok 3 leads
Grok 3: 30.5 (#76), Qwen3.5-9B: 14.5 (#151)
| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal-Bench | — | 9.2% |
| BALROG | 29.5% | — |
Reasoning Qwen3.5-9B leads
Grok 3: 13.7 (#333), Qwen3.5-9B: 23.1 (#182)
| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 138.33 | 139.46 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 0% | — |
| SimpleBench | 36.1% | — |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 61.3% | — |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 5.5% | — |
| CritPt | — | 0.3% |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 12% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1434 | — |
| DTBench | — | 71.2% |
| LMCA | — | 24.5% |
Math Grok 3 leads
Grok 3: 38.0 (#145), Qwen3.5-9B: 34.8 (#192)
| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 55.6% | 61.7% |
| MathArena Final-Answer Competitions | — | 48.5% |
| Omni-MATH | 46.4% | — |
| LMArena Math | 1391 | — |
| MATH Level 5 | 88.7% | — |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 3.8% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | 0% | — |
Knowledge Too close to call
Grok 3: 46.2 (#82), Qwen3.5-9B: 46.0 (#84)
| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 75.8% | 79% |
| MMLU-Pro | 78.8% | — |
| Confabulations | 14.2% | — |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 5.8% | — |
| GPQA (HELM) | 65% | — |
| LMArena Expert | 1421 | — |
Multilingual Not comparable
Grok 3: 52.3 (#87), Qwen3.5-9B: —
| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1410 | — |
| LMArena Chinese | 1448 | — |
| LMArena French | 1460 | — |
| LMArena German | 1431 | — |
| LMArena Japanese | 1387 | — |
| LMArena Korean | 1373 | — |
| LMArena Russian | 1416 | — |
| LMArena Spanish | 1417 | — |
Instruction Following Not comparable
Grok 3: 75.0 (#73), Qwen3.5-9B: —
| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| IFEval | 88.4% | — |
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1409 | — |
Long Context Not comparable
Grok 3: 38.7 (#192), Qwen3.5-9B: —
| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| Fiction.LiveBench | 58.3% | — |
| LMArena Longer Query | 1439 | — |
Writing & Preference Not comparable
Grok 3: 55.8 (#141), Qwen3.5-9B: —
| Benchmark | Grok 3 | Qwen3.5-9B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1426 | — |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1414 | — |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | 76.4% | — |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1186 | — |
| WildBench | 84.9% | — |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1425 | — |
Frequently asked questions
Is Grok 3 better than Qwen3.5-9B?
Grok 3 is the stronger model overall, scoring 39.9 to 33.8 on the Noometry Index.
Is Grok 3 or Qwen3.5-9B better for coding?
Grok 3 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 41.9 versus 35.9 in the Noometry coding category.
How many benchmarks do Grok 3 and Qwen3.5-9B share?
3 benchmarks have published results for both models. Grok 3 has 40 scored results on Noometry and Qwen3.5-9B has 10.