DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 (Max) vs Qwen3.6 27B (Reasoning)

Which is better for the money: DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 (Max) by DeepSeek or Qwen3.6 27B (Reasoning) by Alibaba? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.

Clear winner

DeepSeekDeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 (Max)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 34.30
Total cost: $200

AlibabaQwen3.6 27B (Reasoning)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 21.40
Total cost: $1145

Verdict

Pick DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 (Max)

Qwen3.6 27B (Reasoning) vs DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 (Max): 37.6% less intelligence, 473.7% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 514.7% slower end-to-end.

Metric	DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 (Max)	Qwen3.6 27B (Reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	34.3	21.4	−37.6% Qwen3.6 27B (Reasonin… is 37.6% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$199.63	$1,145.36	+473.7% Qwen3.6 27B (Reasonin… is 5.7× more expensive
End-to-end time (lower is better)	18.12s	111.39s	+514.7% Qwen3.6 27B (Reasonin… is 514.7% slower
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$0.14 / $0.28	$0.60 / $3.60
Input modalities	Text	Text, Image, Video

Open this matchup in the interactive picker DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 (Max): what beats it Qwen3.6 27B (Reasoning): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 (Max) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Haiku 5.5 (Xhigh) scores 41.20 for $158.
Qwen3.6 27B (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Max) scores 51.80 for $1082.

DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 (Max)Qwen3.6 27B (Reasoning)Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model

Matchup

Compare something else

Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/deepseek-v4-flash/qwen3-6-27b · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/deepseek-v4-flash/qwen3-6-27b?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill