Mistral Medium 3 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

Mistral Medium 3· Qwen3.5-27B

Quick Verdict

Pick Qwen3.5-27B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Mistral Medium 3 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 52. 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 30.3. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is LiveCodeBench, 30.3% to 80.7%.

Mistral Medium 3 is also the more expensive model on tokens at $0.40 input / $2.00 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 is the reasoning model in the pair, while Mistral Medium 3 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 128K for Mistral Medium 3.

Operational tradeoffs

Price$0.40 / $2.00Free*
Speed57 t/sN/A
TTFT1.20sN/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.

BenchmarkMistral Medium 3Qwen3.5-27B
Agentic
Terminal-Bench 2.041.6%
BrowseComp61%
OSWorld-Verified56.2%
tau2-bench79%
CodingQwen3.5-27B wins
HumanEval92.1%
LiveCodeBench30.3%80.7%
SWE-bench Verified72.4%
Multimodal & Grounded
MMMU-Pro75%
Reasoning
LongBench v260.6%
KnowledgeQwen3.5-27B wins
GPQA57.1%85.5%
MMLU-Pro77.2%86.1%
SuperGPQA65.6%
Instruction FollowingQwen3.5-27B wins
IFEval89.4%95%
Multilingual
MMLU-ProX82.2%
Mathematics
MATH-50091%
Frequently Asked Questions (4)

Which is better, Mistral Medium 3 or Qwen3.5-27B?

Qwen3.5-27B is ahead overall, 71 to 52. The biggest single separator in this matchup is LiveCodeBench, where the scores are 30.3% and 80.7%.

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

Qwen3.5-27B has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 80.6 versus 70.1. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Mistral Medium 3 or Qwen3.5-27B?

Qwen3.5-27B has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 77.6 versus 30.3. Inside this category, LiveCodeBench is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for instruction following, Mistral Medium 3 or Qwen3.5-27B?

Qwen3.5-27B has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 95 versus 89.4. 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.