Mistral Medium 3.5 vs Qwen3 Coder Next

Which is better for the money: Mistral Medium 3.5 by Mistral or Qwen3 Coder Next by Alibaba? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-10.

Trade-off

MistralMistral Medium 3.5Off the frontier

Intelligence: 14.20
Total cost: $1264

AlibabaQwen3 Coder NextOff the frontier

Intelligence: 9.20
Total cost: $663

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Mistral Medium 3.5 scores 5.0 points higher (14.2 vs 9.2) but costs 1.9× as much to run the benchmark ($1264 vs $663; both premium class). Pick Mistral Medium 3.5 when the extra intelligence is worth the premium, otherwise Qwen3 Coder Next.

Metric	Mistral Medium 3.5	Qwen3 Coder Next	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	14.2	9.2	−35.2% Qwen3 Coder Next is 35.2% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$1,263.80	$662.85	−47.6% Qwen3 Coder Next is 47.6% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	17.57s	7.71s	−56.1% Qwen3 Coder Next is 56.1% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$1.50 / $7.50	$0.50 / $1.20
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text

Qwen3 Coder Next vs Mistral Medium 3.5: 35.2% less intelligence, 47.6% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 56.1% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Mistral Medium 3.5: what beats it Qwen3 Coder Next: what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Mistral Medium 3.5 is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Max) scores 51.80 for $1082.
Qwen3 Coder Next is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Xhigh) scores 51.00 for $662.

Mistral Medium 3.5Qwen3 Coder NextToday'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/mistral-medium-3-5/qwen3-coder-next · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/mistral-medium-3-5/qwen3-coder-next?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill