Model comparison

Ministral 8B vs Qwen3.5 Plus

Qwen3.5 Plus is the stronger model overall, scoring 42.3 to 27.8 on the Noometry Index. Ministral 8B costs 9.0× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Qwen3.5 Plus's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Last verified October 10, 2026. 3 shared benchmarks.

Ministral 8B

Mistral AI

27.8

Rank #321 Confirmed

Qwen3.5 Plus

Alibaba (Qwen)

42.3

Rank #103 Confirmed

Summary

They share 3 benchmarks with published results for both. Ministral 8B scores higher in 0 categories and Qwen3.5 Plus in 4 categories; 4 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
The widest gap is in knowledge, where Qwen3.5 Plus leads 46.0 to 12.5.
The biggest single-benchmark swing is GPQA Diamond: 27.1% for Ministral 8B and 84.8% for Qwen3.5 Plus.
Ministral 8B is cheaper at $0.10 / $0.10 per million input/output tokens, against $0.40 / $2.40 for Qwen3.5 Plus.
Qwen3.5 Plus accepts more context: 1M tokens versus 128K.
Ministral 8B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

Side by side

Ministral 8B and Qwen3.5 Plus specifications
	Ministral 8B	Qwen3.5 Plus
Provider	Mistral AI	Alibaba (Qwen)
Noometry Index	27.8	42.3
Released	2024-10-01	2026-02-16
Weights	Open	Proprietary
Context window	128K	1M
Max output	128K	66K
Input $ / M tokens	$0.10	$0.40
Output $ / M tokens	$0.10	$2.40
Results tracked	17	15

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Category by category

Coding Not comparable

Ministral 8B: 34.4 (#226), Qwen3.5 Plus: —

Coding benchmarks
Benchmark	Ministral 8B	Qwen3.5 Plus
LMArena Coding	1202	—
ALE-Bench	—	621.92

Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable

Ministral 8B: 16.2 (#140), Qwen3.5 Plus: —

Agentic & Tool Use benchmarks
Benchmark	Ministral 8B	Qwen3.5 Plus
Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard	11.1%	—
Vending-Bench 2	—	0.54

Reasoning Qwen3.5 Plus leads

Ministral 8B: 17.7 (#279), Qwen3.5 Plus: 32.0 (#67)

Reasoning benchmarks
Benchmark	Ministral 8B	Qwen3.5 Plus
DTBench	45.7%	80.5%
Chess Puzzles	—	22%
LMArena Hard Prompts	1191	—
Mystery Game Puzzles	—	17%
LMCA	—	36.4%
Epoch Capabilities Index	—	146.79

Math Qwen3.5 Plus leads

Ministral 8B: 23.7 (#262), Qwen3.5 Plus: 47.9 (#55)

Math benchmarks
Benchmark	Ministral 8B	Qwen3.5 Plus
OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025	—	86.7%
LMArena Math	1188	—
MATH Level 5	14.9%	—
FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set)	—	21%
FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1)	—	2.1%

Knowledge Qwen3.5 Plus leads

Ministral 8B: 12.5 (#292), Qwen3.5 Plus: 46.0 (#78)

Knowledge benchmarks
Benchmark	Ministral 8B	Qwen3.5 Plus
GPQA Diamond	27.1%	84.8%
Vectara Hallucination Rate	7.4%	10.7%
SimpleQA Verified	—	25.4%
LMArena Expert	1170	—

Multilingual Not comparable

Ministral 8B: 35.3 (#242), Qwen3.5 Plus: —

Multilingual benchmarks
Benchmark	Ministral 8B	Qwen3.5 Plus
LMArena Non-English	1165	—
LMArena Chinese	1193	—
LMArena Russian	1195	—

Instruction Following Not comparable

Ministral 8B: 60.7 (#245), Qwen3.5 Plus: —

Instruction Following benchmarks
Benchmark	Ministral 8B	Qwen3.5 Plus
LMArena Instruction Following	1161	—

Long Context Qwen3.5 Plus leads

Ministral 8B: 36.7 (#222), Qwen3.5 Plus: 42.9 (#109)

Long Context benchmarks
Benchmark	Ministral 8B	Qwen3.5 Plus
CL-bench	—	19.8%
CL-bench Life	—	12.4%
LMArena Longer Query	1212	—

Writing & Preference Not comparable

Ministral 8B: 39.8 (#241), Qwen3.5 Plus: —

Writing & Preference benchmarks
Benchmark	Ministral 8B	Qwen3.5 Plus
LMArena Text	1191	—
LMArena Creative Writing	1175	—
LMArena Multi-Turn	1166	—

Frequently asked questions

Is Ministral 8B better than Qwen3.5 Plus?

Which is cheaper, Ministral 8B or Qwen3.5 Plus?

Ministral 8B is cheaper. It lists at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.10 per million output tokens; Qwen3.5 Plus lists at $0.40 and $2.40.

Which has the bigger context window?

Qwen3.5 Plus does, with 1M tokens against 128K.

How many benchmarks do Ministral 8B and Qwen3.5 Plus share?

3 benchmarks have published results for both models. Ministral 8B has 17 scored results on Noometry and Qwen3.5 Plus has 15.