Nemotron 3.5 Lightning vs Qwen3 Coder Next
Which is better for the money: Nemotron 3.5 Lightning by NVIDIA or Qwen3 Coder Next by Alibaba? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.
Clear winner
Verdict
Pick Nemotron 3.5 Lightning
Qwen3 Coder Next vs Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 28.7% less intelligence, 336.7% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 31.6% faster end-to-end.
| Metric | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning | Qwen3 Coder Next | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence (higher is better) | 12.9 | 9.2 | −28.7% Qwen3 Coder Next is 28.7% less intelligent |
| Total AA cost (lower is better) | $92.76 | $405.10 | +336.7% Qwen3 Coder Next is 4.4× more expensive |
| End-to-end time (lower is better) | 9.09s | 6.22s | −31.6% Qwen3 Coder Next is 31.6% faster |
| Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | $0.06 / $0.20 | $0.31 / $1.00 | |
| Input modalities | Text | Text |
Today's Pareto frontier
Against the frontier
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (Xhigh) scores 34.60 for $66.8.
- Qwen3 Coder Next is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Medium) scores 47.80 for $361.
Nemotron 3.5 LightningQwen3 Coder NextToday's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model
Matchup
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Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/nemotron-3-5-lightning/qwen3-coder-next · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/nemotron-3-5-lightning/qwen3-coder-next?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill