Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking vs Qwen3.5-35B-A3B

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

Agentic
Coding
Multimodal & Grounded
Reasoning
Knowledge
Instruction Following
Multilingual
Mathematics

Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking· Qwen3.5-35B-A3B

Quick Verdict

Pick Qwen3.5-35B-A3B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking only becomes the better choice if reasoning is the priority.

Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 67 to 58. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Qwen3.5-35B-A3B's sharpest advantage is in knowledge, where it averages 79.3 against 49. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is LiveCodeBench, 45% to 74.6%. Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking does hit back in reasoning, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

Qwen3.5-35B-A3B gives you the larger context window at 262K, compared with 200K for Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking.

Operational tradeoffs

PricePricing unavailableFree*
Speed29 t/sN/A
TTFT15.00sN/A
Context200K262K

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.

BenchmarkClaude 4.1 Opus ThinkingQwen3.5-35B-A3B
AgenticQwen3.5-35B-A3B wins
Terminal-Bench 2.043.3%40.5%
BrowseComp54%61%
OSWorld-Verified47%54.5%
tau2-bench81.2%
CodingQwen3.5-35B-A3B wins
HumanEval68%
SWE-bench Verified74.5%69.2%
LiveCodeBench45%74.6%
SWE-bench Pro29%
Multimodal & GroundedQwen3.5-35B-A3B wins
MMMU-Pro78%75.1%
OfficeQA Pro69%
ReasoningClaude 4.1 Opus Thinking wins
MuSR72%
BBH86%
LongBench v262%59%
MRCRv274%
KnowledgeQwen3.5-35B-A3B wins
MMLU76%
GPQA80.9%84.2%
SuperGPQA72%63.4%
MMLU-Pro76%85.3%
HLE8%
FrontierScience41%
SimpleQA36%
Instruction FollowingQwen3.5-35B-A3B wins
IFEval88%91.9%
MultilingualQwen3.5-35B-A3B wins
MGSM82%
MMLU-ProX73%81%
Mathematics
AIME 202338%
AIME 202440%
AIME 202590%
HMMT Feb 202334%
HMMT Feb 202436%
HMMT Feb 202535%
BRUMO 202537%
MATH-50087%
Frequently Asked Questions (8)

Which is better, Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking or Qwen3.5-35B-A3B?

Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is ahead overall, 67 to 58. The biggest single separator in this matchup is LiveCodeBench, where the scores are 45% and 74.6%.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking or Qwen3.5-35B-A3B?

Qwen3.5-35B-A3B has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 79.3 versus 49. Inside this category, MMLU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking or Qwen3.5-35B-A3B?

Qwen3.5-35B-A3B has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 72.6 versus 45.7. Inside this category, LiveCodeBench is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for reasoning, Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking or Qwen3.5-35B-A3B?

Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 68.7 versus 59. Inside this category, LongBench v2 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for agentic tasks, Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking or Qwen3.5-35B-A3B?

Qwen3.5-35B-A3B has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 50.5 versus 47.3. Inside this category, OSWorld-Verified is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multimodal and grounded tasks, Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking or Qwen3.5-35B-A3B?

Qwen3.5-35B-A3B has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 75.1 versus 74. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for instruction following, Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking or Qwen3.5-35B-A3B?

Qwen3.5-35B-A3B has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 91.9 versus 88. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multilingual tasks, Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking or Qwen3.5-35B-A3B?

Qwen3.5-35B-A3B has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 81 versus 76.2. Inside this category, MMLU-ProX is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 31, 2026

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