As of August 21, 2026, Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct is 28% cheaper per million tokens than Grok-3 Mini. Grok-3 Mini is $0.30 / $0.50 per million input/output tokens versus Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct at $0.08 / $0.50. 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-3 Mini
xAI
Input
$0.30
Output
$0.50
Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct
Qwen
Input
$0.08
Output
$0.50
Token pricing, specs, and benchmarks side by side
Grok-3 MiniQwen3 VL 8B InstructVerdict
Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct offers significantly lower pricing, while Grok-3 Mini leads on benchmark performance. Your choice depends on whether cost efficiency or raw capability matters more for your use case.
As of August 21, 2026, Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct is 28% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct costs $0.08 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens ($0.58 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). Grok-3 Mini costs $0.30 / $0.50 per million tokens ($0.80 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-3 Mini xAI API pricing is $0.30 input and $0.50 output per million tokens via xAI. Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct Qwen API pricing is $0.08 input and $0.50 output per million tokens via Qwen. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
Grok-3 Mini has a published LiveCodeBench score of 80.4%. Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct does not have that eval on this page yet.
Grok-3 Mini supports a 128K token context window, while Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct supports 262K tokens. Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct 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.
Grok-3 Mini leads on 2 of 2 shared benchmarks versus Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct'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-3 Mini and Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct 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-3 Mini through xAI and Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct 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-3 Mini supports up to 8K output tokens per request, while Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct supports up to 33K 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-3 Mini has a measured throughput of approximately 100 tokens/second. Throughput data for Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct 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-3 Mini or Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct 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-3 Mini costs $0.30/M input and $0.50/M output. Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct costs $0.08/M input and $0.50/M output.
Rank both on the LLM leaderboard, SWE-bench, and Humanity's Last Exam.
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