Grok 3 Mini 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

Grok 3 Mini· Qwen3.5-27B

Quick Verdict

Pick Qwen3.5-27B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Grok 3 Mini only becomes the better choice if its workflow or ecosystem matters more than the raw scoreboard.

Qwen3.5-27B is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 71 to 49. 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 coding, where it averages 77.6 against 41.5. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is LiveCodeBench, 41.5% to 80.7%.

Grok 3 Mini is also the more expensive model on tokens at $0.30 input / $0.50 output per 1M tokens, versus $0.00 input / $0.00 output per 1M tokens for Qwen3.5-27B. That is roughly Infinityx on output cost alone. Qwen3.5-27B gives you the larger context window at 262K, compared with 128K for Grok 3 Mini.

Operational tradeoffs

ProviderxAIAlibaba
Price$0.30 / $0.50Free*
Speed190 t/sN/A
TTFT0.54sN/A
Context128K262K

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.

BenchmarkGrok 3 MiniQwen3.5-27B
Agentic
Terminal-Bench 2.041.6%
BrowseComp61%
OSWorld-Verified56.2%
tau2-bench79%
CodingQwen3.5-27B wins
LiveCodeBench41.5%80.7%
SWE-bench Verified72.4%
Multimodal & Grounded
MMMU-Pro75%
Reasoning
LongBench v260.6%
KnowledgeQwen3.5-27B wins
GPQA66.2%85.5%
MMLU-Pro78.9%86.1%
SimpleQA21.7%
SuperGPQA65.6%
Instruction Following
IFEval95%
Multilingual
MMLU-ProX82.2%
Mathematics
AIME 202495.8%
Frequently Asked Questions (3)

Which is better, Grok 3 Mini or Qwen3.5-27B?

Qwen3.5-27B is ahead overall, 71 to 49. The biggest single separator in this matchup is LiveCodeBench, where the scores are 41.5% and 80.7%.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Grok 3 Mini or Qwen3.5-27B?

Qwen3.5-27B has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 80.6 versus 59.8. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Grok 3 Mini or Qwen3.5-27B?

Qwen3.5-27B has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 77.6 versus 41.5. Inside this category, LiveCodeBench 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.