o3 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

o3· Qwen3.5-27B

Quick Verdict

Pick Qwen3.5-27B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. o3 only becomes the better choice if agentic is the priority.

Qwen3.5-27B is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 71 to 65. 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 54.2. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is LiveCodeBench, 40% to 80.7%. o3 does hit back in agentic, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

o3 is also the more expensive model on tokens at $10.00 input / $40.00 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 gives you the larger context window at 262K, compared with 200K for o3.

Operational tradeoffs

Price$10.00 / $40.00Free*
Speed118 t/sN/A
TTFT5.38sN/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.

Benchmarko3Qwen3.5-27B
Agentico3 wins
Terminal-Bench 2.071%41.6%
BrowseComp75%61%
OSWorld-Verified65%56.2%
tau2-bench79%
CodingQwen3.5-27B wins
HumanEval78%
SWE-bench Verified71.7%72.4%
LiveCodeBench40%80.7%
SWE-bench Pro58%
Multimodal & GroundedQwen3.5-27B wins
MMMU-Pro70%75%
OfficeQA Pro75%
Reasoningo3 wins
MuSR82%
BBH86%
LongBench v282%60.6%
MRCRv281%
ARC-AGI-23%
KnowledgeQwen3.5-27B wins
MMLU86%
GPQA87%85.5%
SuperGPQA85%65.6%
MMLU-Pro75%86.1%
HLE24%
FrontierScience77%
SimpleQA84%
Instruction FollowingQwen3.5-27B wins
IFEval85%95%
MultilingualQwen3.5-27B wins
MGSM83%
MMLU-ProX80%82.2%
Mathematics
AIME 202388%
AIME 202490%
AIME 202589%
HMMT Feb 202384%
HMMT Feb 202486%
HMMT Feb 202585%
BRUMO 202587%
MATH-50088%
Frequently Asked Questions (8)

Which is better, o3 or Qwen3.5-27B?

Qwen3.5-27B is ahead overall, 71 to 65. The biggest single separator in this matchup is LiveCodeBench, where the scores are 40% and 80.7%.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, o3 or Qwen3.5-27B?

Qwen3.5-27B has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 80.6 versus 67.4. Inside this category, SuperGPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, o3 or Qwen3.5-27B?

Qwen3.5-27B has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 77.6 versus 54.2. Inside this category, LiveCodeBench is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for reasoning, o3 or Qwen3.5-27B?

o3 has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 62 versus 60.6. Inside this category, LongBench v2 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for agentic tasks, o3 or Qwen3.5-27B?

o3 has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 69.9 versus 51.6. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multimodal and grounded tasks, o3 or Qwen3.5-27B?

Qwen3.5-27B has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 75 versus 72.3. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for instruction following, o3 or Qwen3.5-27B?

Qwen3.5-27B has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 95 versus 85. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multilingual tasks, o3 or Qwen3.5-27B?

Qwen3.5-27B has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 82.2 versus 81.1. Inside this category, MMLU-ProX is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 31, 2026

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