1-bit Bonsai 1.7B vs Qwen3.5-27B

Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.

Agentic
Coding
Multimodal & Grounded
Reasoning
Knowledge
Instruction Following
Multilingual
Mathematics

1-bit Bonsai 1.7B· Qwen3.5-27B

Quick Verdict

Pick Qwen3.5-27B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. 1-bit Bonsai 1.7B only becomes the better choice if you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.

Qwen3.5-27B is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 71 to 39. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Qwen3.5-27B's sharpest advantage is in knowledge, where it averages 80.6 against 20.7. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is GPQA, 20.7% to 85.5%.

Qwen3.5-27B is the reasoning model in the pair, while 1-bit Bonsai 1.7B is not. That usually helps on harder chain-of-thought-heavy tests, but it can also mean more latency and more token spend in real use. Qwen3.5-27B gives you the larger context window at 262K, compared with 32K for 1-bit Bonsai 1.7B.

Operational tradeoffs

PriceFree*Free*
SpeedN/AN/A
TTFTN/AN/A
Context32K262K

Decision framing

BenchLM keeps the benchmark table and the operator tradeoffs on the same page so a better score does not hide a materially slower, pricier, or smaller-context model.

Runtime metrics show N/A when BenchLM does not have a sourced snapshot for that exact model. The scoring rules and freshness policy are documented on the methodology page.

Benchmark1-bit Bonsai 1.7BQwen3.5-27B
Agentic
Terminal-Bench 2.041.6%
BrowseComp61%
OSWorld-Verified56.2%
tau2-bench79%
Coding
SWE-bench Verified72.4%
LiveCodeBench80.7%
Multimodal & Grounded
MMMU-Pro75%
ReasoningQwen3.5-27B wins
MuSR45.1%
LongBench v260.6%
KnowledgeQwen3.5-27B wins
GPQA20.7%85.5%
MMLU-Pro86.1%
SuperGPQA65.6%
Instruction FollowingQwen3.5-27B wins
IFEval63%95%
Multilingual
MMLU-ProX82.2%
Mathematics
MATH-50034.4%
Frequently Asked Questions (4)

Which is better, 1-bit Bonsai 1.7B or Qwen3.5-27B?

Qwen3.5-27B is ahead overall, 71 to 39. The biggest single separator in this matchup is GPQA, where the scores are 20.7% and 85.5%.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, 1-bit Bonsai 1.7B or Qwen3.5-27B?

Qwen3.5-27B has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 80.6 versus 20.7. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for reasoning, 1-bit Bonsai 1.7B or Qwen3.5-27B?

Qwen3.5-27B has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 60.6 versus 45.1. 1-bit Bonsai 1.7B stays close enough that the answer can still flip depending on your workload.

Which is better for instruction following, 1-bit Bonsai 1.7B or Qwen3.5-27B?

Qwen3.5-27B has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 95 versus 63. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 31, 2026

Weekly LLM Benchmark Digest

Get notified when new models drop, benchmark scores change, or the leaderboard shifts. One email per week.

Free. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. We only store derived location metadata for consent routing.