# Qwen3 235B-A22B vs Step 5 Preview

> Qwen3 235B-A22B and Step 5 Preview score almost the same on the Noometry Index (43.2 vs 43.8), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/qwen3-235b-a22b-vs-step-5-preview
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 2

## Summary

- They share 2 benchmarks with published results for both. Qwen3 235B-A22B scores higher in 0 categories and Step 5 Preview in 2 categories; 2 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Step 5 Preview leads 38.0 to 15.8.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is CritPt: 0% for Qwen3 235B-A22B and 20.9% for Step 5 Preview.
- Qwen3 235B-A22B is cheaper at $0.70 / $2.80 per million input/output tokens, against $1 / $2.70 for Step 5 Preview.
- Step 5 Preview accepts more context: 1.02M tokens versus 131K.
- Qwen3 235B-A22B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Qwen3 235B-A22B | Step 5 Preview |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Alibaba (Qwen) | StepFun |
| Noometry Index | 43.2 | 43.8 |
| Rank | 83 | 78 |
| Context | 131K | 1.02M |
| Input $/M | $0.70 | $1 |
| Output $/M | $2.80 | $2.70 |
| Weights | Open | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Qwen3 235B-A22B: 43.8 (#72)
- Step 5 Preview: 50.6 (#40)

| Benchmark | Qwen3 235B-A22B | Step 5 Preview |
|---|---|---|
| SciCode | 42.4% | 58.9% |
| Aider Polyglot | 59.6% | — |
| LMArena WebDev | — | 1569 |
| WeirdML | 41% | — |
| LMArena Coding | 1445 | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Qwen3 235B-A22B: 33.7 (#48)
- Step 5 Preview: —

| Benchmark | Qwen3 235B-A22B | Step 5 Preview |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | 52.1% | — |
| Vending-Bench 2 | -11.34 | — |

## Reasoning

- Qwen3 235B-A22B: 15.8 (#302)
- Step 5 Preview: 38.0 (#58)

| Benchmark | Qwen3 235B-A22B | Step 5 Preview |
|---|---|---|
| CritPt | 0% | 20.9% |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 1.3% | — |
| SimpleBench | 31% | — |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 69.4% | — |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 11% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | 12% | — |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1433 | — |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | 9% | — |
| DTBench | 80.3% | — |
| LMCA | 29.3% | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 143.87 | — |
| ForecastBench | 59.7 | — |

## Math

- Qwen3 235B-A22B: 48.5 (#51)
- Step 5 Preview: —

| Benchmark | Qwen3 235B-A22B | Step 5 Preview |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 86.7% | — |
| Omni-MATH | 71.8% | — |
| LMArena Math | 1431 | — |
| MATH Level 5 | 68.9% | — |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 8.5% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | 0% | — |

## Knowledge

- Qwen3 235B-A22B: 49.5 (#67)
- Step 5 Preview: —

| Benchmark | Qwen3 235B-A22B | Step 5 Preview |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 80.1% | — |
| SimpleQA Verified | 40.4% | — |
| MMLU-Pro | 84.4% | — |
| Confabulations | 15.6% | — |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 9.3% | — |
| GPQA (HELM) | 72.7% | — |
| LMArena Expert | 1460 | — |

## Multilingual

- Qwen3 235B-A22B: 52.5 (#84)
- Step 5 Preview: —

| Benchmark | Qwen3 235B-A22B | Step 5 Preview |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1410 | — |
| LMArena Chinese | 1481 | — |
| LMArena French | 1445 | — |
| LMArena German | 1432 | — |
| LMArena Japanese | 1400 | — |
| LMArena Korean | 1391 | — |
| LMArena Russian | 1411 | — |
| LMArena Spanish | 1429 | — |

## Instruction Following

- Qwen3 235B-A22B: 72.8 (#132)
- Step 5 Preview: —

| Benchmark | Qwen3 235B-A22B | Step 5 Preview |
|---|---|---|
| IFEval | 83.5% | — |
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1408 | — |

## Long Context

- Qwen3 235B-A22B: 46.1 (#25)
- Step 5 Preview: —

| Benchmark | Qwen3 235B-A22B | Step 5 Preview |
|---|---|---|
| Fiction.LiveBench | 75% | — |
| LMArena Longer Query | 1426 | — |

## Writing & Preference

- Qwen3 235B-A22B: 59.8 (#103)
- Step 5 Preview: —

| Benchmark | Qwen3 235B-A22B | Step 5 Preview |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1419 | — |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1384 | — |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | 83% | — |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1366 | — |
| WildBench | 86.6% | — |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1432 | — |

## FAQ

### Is Qwen3 235B-A22B better than Step 5 Preview?

Qwen3 235B-A22B and Step 5 Preview score almost the same on the Noometry Index (43.2 vs 43.8), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

### Which is cheaper, Qwen3 235B-A22B or Step 5 Preview?

Qwen3 235B-A22B is cheaper. It lists at $0.70 per million input tokens and $2.80 per million output tokens; Step 5 Preview lists at $1 and $2.70.

### Is Qwen3 235B-A22B or Step 5 Preview better for coding?

Step 5 Preview scores higher on coding benchmarks: 50.6 versus 43.8 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Step 5 Preview does, with 1.02M tokens against 131K.

### How many benchmarks do Qwen3 235B-A22B and Step 5 Preview share?

2 benchmarks have published results for both models. Qwen3 235B-A22B has 49 scored results on Noometry and Step 5 Preview has 3.