As of August 25, 2026, Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is 88% cheaper per million tokens than Grok-4.1 Thinking. Grok-4.1 Thinking is $3.00 / $15.00 per million input/output tokens versus Qwen3.5-35B-A3B at $0.25 / $2.00. Sources: https://docs.x.ai/docs/models and https://bailian.console.aliyun.com/
Sources: xAI API pricing (https://docs.x.ai/docs/models); Qwen pricing (https://bailian.console.aliyun.com/)
Grok-4.1 Thinking
xAI
Input
$3.00
Output
$15.00
Qwen3.5-35B-A3B
Qwen
Input
$0.25
Output
$2.00
Token pricing, specs, and benchmarks side by side
Each bar is share of the current leader on that eval. Click a row to open the board.
Arena Code Elo. Left is cheaper. Up is a higher score. The line is the best score you can buy at each price.
Grok-4.1 ThinkingQwen3.5-35B-A3BVerdict
Qwen3.5-35B-A3B offers both lower pricing and stronger benchmark performance across the board, making it the clear value leader in this comparison.
As of August 25, 2026, Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is 88% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. Qwen3.5-35B-A3B costs $0.25 per million input tokens and $2.00 per million output tokens ($2.25 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). Grok-4.1 Thinking costs $3.00 / $15.00 per million tokens ($18.00 blended). Sources: https://docs.x.ai/docs/models and https://bailian.console.aliyun.com/. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.
Grok-4.1 Thinking xAI API pricing is $3.00 input and $15.00 output per million tokens via xAI. Qwen3.5-35B-A3B Qwen API pricing is $0.25 input and $2.00 output per million tokens via Qwen. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
Qwen3.5-35B-A3B has a published SWE-bench Verified score of 69.2%. Grok-4.1 Thinking does not have that eval on this page yet.
Grok-4.1 Thinking supports a 256K token context window, while Qwen3.5-35B-A3B supports 262K tokens. Qwen3.5-35B-A3B offers a larger context window. Filling a larger window bills more input tokens, so the cheaper-per-million model can still cost more on long documents.
Qwen3.5-35B-A3B leads on 1 of 1 shared benchmarks versus Grok-4.1 Thinking's 0 wins. Check the comparison table for GPQA Diamond, SWE-bench, MMLU, HLE, and the other evals we track. Token price and benchmark score together are the usual LLM comparison, not either number alone.
Both Grok-4.1 Thinking and Qwen3.5-35B-A3B are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, Qwen3.5-35B-A3B has better economics on the blended 1M-in + 1M-out scale. For maximum capability, weight the benchmark table for your domain. Many production stacks route cheap models for drafts and a frontier model for the hard turn, which is usually cheaper than sending everything to the expensive API.
Yes. Call Grok-4.1 Thinking through xAI and Qwen3.5-35B-A3B through Qwen with separate API keys, or through a gateway that already wraps both. Keep prompts in tokens, not characters, when you estimate the invoice. AnotherWrapper templates can swap providers without rewriting auth and billing.
List rates are the latest published xAI API pricing and Qwen API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://docs.x.ai/docs/models and https://bailian.console.aliyun.com/. Prompt caching, batch APIs, and committed-use discounts can change the invoice. Benchmark scores are from official publications and independent evals, updated as new numbers land.
Grok-4.1 Thinking supports up to 8K output tokens per request, while Qwen3.5-35B-A3B supports up to 65K output tokens. Output tokens are usually the expensive half of API pricing, so a higher max output cap is a capability, not a discount.
Grok-4.1 Thinking has a measured throughput of approximately 80 tokens/second. Throughput data for Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is not yet available. Throughput (tokens per second) and time-to-first-token are why two models with the same per-million-token price can still feel different in chat and agents.
Use the model pickers at the top of this LLM comparison. Search any model in the index and the URL updates. Open Grok-4.1 Thinking or Qwen3.5-35B-A3B from the sidebar for the single-model API pricing page, or go back to the LLM pricing table to sort by cheapest blended cost.
This comparison covers API pricing, context window, throughput, and benchmark scores. Grok-4.1 Thinking costs $3.00/M input and $15.00/M output. Qwen3.5-35B-A3B costs $0.25/M input and $2.00/M output.
Rank both on the LLM leaderboard, SWE-bench, and Humanity's Last Exam.
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