MiniMax M3 vs Qwen3.5-35B-A3B

Pick MiniMax M3 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Qwen3.5-35B-A3B only becomes the better choice if you want the cheaper token bill or you want the stronger reasoning-first profile.

MiniMax M3 is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 76 to 56. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

MiniMax M3's sharpest advantage is in agentic, where it averages 71.9 against 50.6. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is Terminal-Bench 2.0, 66% to 40.5%.

MiniMax M3 is also the more expensive model on tokens at $0.30 input / $1.20 output per 1M tokens, versus $0.00 input / $0.00 output per 1M tokens for Qwen3.5-35B-A3B. That is roughly Infinityx on output cost alone. Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is the reasoning model in the pair, while MiniMax M3 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. MiniMax M3 gives you the larger context window at 1M, compared with 262K for Qwen3.5-35B-A3B.