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 2026-09-09.
Clear winner
Verdict
Pick Nemotron 3.5 Lightning
Qwen3 Coder Next vs Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 25.7% less intelligence, 351.3% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 40.2% faster end-to-end.
| Metric | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning | Qwen3 Coder Next | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence (higher is better) | 13.6 | 10.1 | −25.7% Qwen3 Coder Next is 25.7% less intelligent |
| Total AA cost (lower is better) | $105.48 | $476.03 | +351.3% Qwen3 Coder Next is 4.5× more expensive |
| End-to-end time (lower is better) | 9.23s | 5.52s | −40.2% Qwen3 Coder Next is 40.2% faster |
| Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | $0.06 / $0.20 | $0.35 / $1.20 | |
| Input modalities | Not reported | Not reported |
Today's Pareto frontier
Against the frontier
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, MiMo-V2.5 scores 22.30 for $42.6.
- Qwen3 Coder Next is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GLM-5.3-Flash scores 41.90 for $280.
Nemotron 3.5 LightningQwen3 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/nemotron-3-5-lightning/qwen3-coder-next · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/nemotron-3-5-lightning/qwen3-coder-next?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill