Model comparison

o3 vs Qwen3.5 Plus

o3 is the stronger model overall, scoring 47.5 to 42.9 on the Noometry Index. Qwen3.5 Plus costs 3.9× less per token, which makes it the better buy when o3's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Last verified . 12 shared benchmarks.

o3 OpenAI

47.5

Rank #61 Confirmed

Qwen3.5 Plus Alibaba (Qwen)

42.9

Rank #106 Confirmed

Summary

  • They share 12 benchmarks with published results for both. o3 scores higher in 3 categories and Qwen3.5 Plus in 1 category; 2 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in long context, where o3 leads 53.3 to 43.0.
  • The biggest single-benchmark swing is SimpleQA Verified: 49.4% for o3 and 25.4% for Qwen3.5 Plus.
  • Qwen3.5 Plus is cheaper at $0.40 / $2.40 per million input/output tokens, against $2 / $8 for o3.
  • Qwen3.5 Plus accepts more context: 1M tokens versus 200K.

Side by side

o3 and Qwen3.5 Plus specifications
o3Qwen3.5 Plus
ProviderOpenAIAlibaba (Qwen)
Noometry Index47.542.9
Released2025-04-162026-02-16
WeightsProprietaryProprietary
Context window200K1M
Max output100K66K
Input $ / M tokens$2$0.40
Output $ / M tokens$8$2.40
Results tracked6315

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Category by category

Coding Not comparable

o3: 46.8 (#64), Qwen3.5 Plus: —

Coding benchmarks
Benchmarko3Qwen3.5 Plus
ALE-Bench933.55621.92
SWE-bench Verified62.3%—
SWE-bench Verified (bash only)58.4%—
Aider Polyglot81.3%—
GSO8.8%—
WeirdML52.4%—
LMArena Coding1408—
CadEval74%—

Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable

o3: 34.5 (#44), Qwen3.5 Plus: —

Agentic & Tool Use benchmarks
Benchmarko3Qwen3.5 Plus
Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard63%—
GDPval30.8%—
DeepResearch Bench45.2%—
OSWorld23%—
LMArena Search1144—
METR Time Horizons65.4%—
Vending-Bench 2—0.54

Reasoning Too close to call

o3: 32.0 (#78), Qwen3.5 Plus: 32.8 (#74)

Reasoning benchmarks
Benchmarko3Qwen3.5 Plus
Chess Puzzles38%22%
Mystery Game Puzzles29%17%
DTBench84.8%80.5%
LMCA39.7%36.4%
Epoch Capabilities Index146.86146.78
ARC-AGI-26.5%—
SimpleBench53.1%—
Kagi LLM Benchmark67.6%—
ARC-AGI-160.8%—
CritPt1.4%—
EnigmaEval13.1%—
LMArena Hard Prompts1402—
ForecastBench62.5—

Math Too close to call

o3: 50.2 (#58), Qwen3.5 Plus: 49.6 (#61)

Math benchmarks
Benchmarko3Qwen3.5 Plus
OTIS Mock AIME 2024-202584.4%86.7%
FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set)18.7%21%
FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1)2.1%2.1%
FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3)33.3%—
Omni-MATH71.4%—
LMArena Math1426—
MATH Level 597.8%—

Knowledge o3 leads

o3: 54.6 (#52), Qwen3.5 Plus: 46.0 (#83)

Knowledge benchmarks
Benchmarko3Qwen3.5 Plus
GPQA Diamond81.8%84.8%
SimpleQA Verified49.4%25.4%
Humanity's Last Exam20.3%—
MMLU-Pro85.9%—
Confabulations14.4%—
Vectara Hallucination Rate—10.7%
GPQA (HELM)75.3%—
LMArena Expert1402—

Multimodal Not comparable

o3: 41.4 (#36), Qwen3.5 Plus: —

Multimodal benchmarks
Benchmarko3Qwen3.5 Plus
LMArena Vision1214—
GeoBench74%—
VPCT52%—

Multilingual Not comparable

o3: 51.7 (#105), Qwen3.5 Plus: —

Multilingual benchmarks
Benchmarko3Qwen3.5 Plus
LMArena Non-English1401—
LMArena Chinese1437—
LMArena French1430—
LMArena German1420—
LMArena Japanese1403—
LMArena Korean1370—
LMArena Russian1406—
LMArena Spanish1395—

Instruction Following Not comparable

o3: 72.8 (#127), Qwen3.5 Plus: —

Instruction Following benchmarks
Benchmarko3Qwen3.5 Plus
IFEval86.9%—
LMArena Instruction Following1368—

Long Context o3 leads

o3: 53.3 (#6), Qwen3.5 Plus: 43.0 (#113)

Long Context benchmarks
Benchmarko3Qwen3.5 Plus
CL-bench17.8%19.8%
Fiction.LiveBench88.9%—
CL-bench Life—12.4%
LMArena Longer Query1372—

Writing & Preference Not comparable

o3: 63.5 (#64), Qwen3.5 Plus: —

Writing & Preference benchmarks
Benchmarko3Qwen3.5 Plus
LMArena Text1410—
LMArena Creative Writing1359—
Short-Story Creative Writing83.9%—
EQ-Bench Creative Writing1676—
WildBench86.1%—
LMArena Multi-Turn1405—

Frequently asked questions

Is o3 better than Qwen3.5 Plus?

o3 is the stronger model overall, scoring 47.5 to 42.9 on the Noometry Index. Qwen3.5 Plus costs 3.9× 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 Plus?

Qwen3.5 Plus is cheaper. It lists at $0.40 per million input tokens and $2.40 per million output tokens; o3 lists at $2 and $8.

Which has the bigger context window?

Qwen3.5 Plus does, with 1M tokens against 200K.

How many benchmarks do o3 and Qwen3.5 Plus share?

12 benchmarks have published results for both models. o3 has 63 scored results on Noometry and Qwen3.5 Plus has 15.

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