Qwen3.8 vs Gemini 3.6 Flash
Qwen3.8 is from Alibaba, released August 3, 2026. Gemini 3.6 Flash is from Google, released July 21, 2026.
- LMArena Elo1483 vs 1482. Qwen3.8 is 0.1% ahead on LMArena Elo.
- Input per 1M$2 vs $0.75. Gemini 3.6 Flash costs 63% less per million input tokens.
- Output per 1M$6 vs $3.75. Gemini 3.6 Flash costs 38% less per million output tokens.
- Context window262k vs 1M. Gemini 3.6 Flash takes 282% more context in one request.
Prices are the vendors’ published API rates; Elo is LMArena’s text board. Each figure is dated on its model page.
Interactive Comparison
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$2 / $6 per million tokens | $0.75 / $3.75 per million tokens | |
|---|---|---|
| Identity | ||
| Developer | Alibaba | |
| Released | Aug 2026 | Jul 2026 |
| Status | GA | — |
| Licence | Open weights under a licence named "qwen3.8-max" - NOT Apache 2.0 (the Qwen3.8-27B sibling is Apache 2.0, which is a common source of confusion) | Proprietary |
| Self-hostable | Yes - Qwen/Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B and an FP8 checkpoint published 12 Aug 2026 | No |
| Cost | ||
| Blended $/1M tokensinput × 0.75 + output × 0.25 | $3.000 / 1M tokens | $1.500 / 1M tokens |
| Input price | $2.000 / 1M tokens | $0.750 / 1M tokens |
| Output price | $6.000 / 1M tokens | $3.750 / 1M tokens |
| Cached input | Not documented | — |
| Batch discount | Not documented | — |
| Free tier | Not documented | — |
| Capacity | ||
| Context window | 262k native (extensible to ~1.01M) | 1M tokens |
| Max output | 128k tokens | — |
| Long-context surcharge | Not documented | — |
| Capability | ||
| Vision in | No - text-only. Alibaba’s model card states "Multimodal inputs are not supported". The multimodal sibling is Qwen3.8-27B (Apache 2.0), which is tagged Image-Text-to-Text and does accept images and video. | Yes |
| Audio in | No | — |
| Function calling | Yes | — |
| Structured output | Yes | — |
| Extended reasoning | Yes - thinking mode is required for all interactions, not optional | — |
| Web search | Not documented | — |
| Code execution | Not documented | — |
| Access | ||
| API | Yes | — |
| Chat app | Yes | — |
| Cloud marketplaces | Alibaba Cloud Model Studio | — |
| Fine-tuning | Yes - open weights permit it | — |
| Measured quality | ||
| LMArena Elo | 1483 (checked Oct 2026) | 1482 (checked Oct 2026) |
| LMArena rank | Rank 22 | Rank 23 |
| GPQA Diamond | — | 94 |
| Elo per dollarLMArena Elo ÷ blended $/1M tokens | 494 | 988 |
