Model comparison

o3 vs Qwen3.5 35B-A3B

o3 is the stronger model overall, scoring 47.4 to 41.7 on the Noometry Index. Qwen3.5 35B-A3B costs 5.1× less per token, which makes it the better buy when o3's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Last verified . 24 shared benchmarks.

o3 OpenAI

47.4

Rank #53 Confirmed

Qwen3.5 35B-A3B Alibaba (Qwen)

41.7

Rank #118 Confirmed

Summary

  • They share 24 benchmarks with published results for both. o3 scores higher in 7 categories and Qwen3.5 35B-A3B in 1 category; 7 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in coding, where o3 leads 47.3 to 33.5.
  • The biggest single-benchmark swing is Chess Puzzles: 38% for o3 and 10% for Qwen3.5 35B-A3B.
  • Qwen3.5 35B-A3B is cheaper at $0.25 / $2 per million input/output tokens, against $2 / $8 for o3.
  • Qwen3.5 35B-A3B accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 200K.
  • Qwen3.5 35B-A3B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

Side by side

o3 and Qwen3.5 35B-A3B specifications
o3Qwen3.5 35B-A3B
ProviderOpenAIAlibaba (Qwen)
Noometry Index47.441.7
Released2025-04-162026-02-01
WeightsProprietaryOpen
Context window200K262K
Max output100K66K
Input $ / M tokens$2$0.25
Output $ / M tokens$8$2
Results tracked6328

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Category by category

Coding o3 leads

o3: 47.3 (#57), Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 33.5 (#244)

Coding benchmarks
Benchmarko3Qwen3.5 35B-A3B
LMArena Coding14081410
SWE-bench Verified62.3%—
SWE-bench Verified (bash only)58.4%—
Aider Polyglot81.3%—
LMArena WebDev—1254
SciCode—29.3%
GSO8.8%—
WeirdML52.4%—
CadEval74%—
ALE-Bench933.55—

Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable

o3: 34.3 (#42), Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: —

Agentic & Tool Use benchmarks
Benchmarko3Qwen3.5 35B-A3B
Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard63%—
GDPval30.8%—
DeepResearch Bench45.2%—
OSWorld23%—
LMArena Search1144—
METR Time Horizons65.4%—

Reasoning o3 leads

o3: 32.1 (#66), Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 23.9 (#158)

Reasoning benchmarks
Benchmarko3Qwen3.5 35B-A3B
CritPt1.4%0.6%
Chess Puzzles38%10%
LMArena Hard Prompts14021400
DTBench84.8%80%
LMCA39.7%29.5%
Epoch Capabilities Index146.88142.52
ARC-AGI-26.5%—
SimpleBench53.1%—
Kagi LLM Benchmark67.6%—
ARC-AGI-160.8%—
EnigmaEval13.1%—
Mystery Game Puzzles29%—
ForecastBench62.5—

Math o3 leads

o3: 48.9 (#49), Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 38.4 (#86)

Knowledge o3 leads

o3: 54.5 (#47), Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 47.7 (#73)

Knowledge benchmarks
Benchmarko3Qwen3.5 35B-A3B
GPQA Diamond81.8%83.5%
LMArena Expert14031408
Humanity's Last Exam20.3%—
SimpleQA Verified49.4%—
MMLU-Pro85.9%—
Confabulations14.4%—
Vectara Hallucination Rate—10.5%
GPQA (HELM)75.3%—

Multimodal Not comparable

o3: 40.7 (#35), Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: —

Multimodal benchmarks
Benchmarko3Qwen3.5 35B-A3B
LMArena Vision1214—
GeoBench74%—
VPCT52%—

Multilingual o3 leads

o3: 51.9 (#99), Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 50.2 (#122)

Multilingual benchmarks
Benchmarko3Qwen3.5 35B-A3B
LMArena Non-English14021379
LMArena Chinese14381458
LMArena French14301412
LMArena German14201367
LMArena Japanese14041326
LMArena Korean13711354
LMArena Russian14071377
LMArena Spanish13951390

Instruction Following Too close to call

o3: 73.0 (#122), Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 73.0 (#123)

Instruction Following benchmarks
Benchmarko3Qwen3.5 35B-A3B
LMArena Instruction Following13681379
IFEval86.9%—

Long Context o3 leads

o3: 53.2 (#6), Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 42.4 (#122)

Long Context benchmarks
Benchmarko3Qwen3.5 35B-A3B
LMArena Longer Query13721390
Fiction.LiveBench88.9%—
CL-bench17.8%—

Writing & Preference o3 leads

o3: 63.7 (#62), Qwen3.5 35B-A3B: 58.1 (#118)

Writing & Preference benchmarks
Benchmarko3Qwen3.5 35B-A3B
LMArena Text14101395
LMArena Creative Writing13591347
LMArena Multi-Turn14051391
Short-Story Creative Writing83.9%—
EQ-Bench Creative Writing1676—
WildBench86.1%—

Frequently asked questions

Is o3 better than Qwen3.5 35B-A3B?

o3 is the stronger model overall, scoring 47.4 to 41.7 on the Noometry Index. Qwen3.5 35B-A3B costs 5.1× less per token, which makes it the better buy when o3's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Which is cheaper, o3 or Qwen3.5 35B-A3B?

Qwen3.5 35B-A3B is cheaper. It lists at $0.25 per million input tokens and $2 per million output tokens; o3 lists at $2 and $8.

Is o3 or Qwen3.5 35B-A3B better for coding?

o3 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 47.3 versus 33.5 in the Noometry coding category.

Which has the bigger context window?

Qwen3.5 35B-A3B does, with 262K tokens against 200K.

How many benchmarks do o3 and Qwen3.5 35B-A3B share?

24 benchmarks have published results for both models. o3 has 63 scored results on Noometry and Qwen3.5 35B-A3B has 28.

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