NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning) vs Qwen3.8 27B (Medium)

Which is better for the money: NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning) by NVIDIA or Qwen3.8 27B (Medium) by Alibaba? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-27.

Trade-off

NVIDIANVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 8.90
Total cost: $63.7

AlibabaQwen3.8 27B (Medium)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 27.60
Total cost: $1278

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Qwen3.8 27B (Medium) scores 18.7 points higher (27.6 vs 8.9) but costs 20× as much to run the benchmark ($1278 vs $63.7; premium vs mid-range cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Qwen3.8 27B (Medium) when you need intelligence above 8.9, and NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoni… when 8.9 is enough.

Metric	NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)	Qwen3.8 27B (Medium)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	8.9	27.6	+210.1% Qwen3.8 27B (Medium) is 3.1× more intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$63.74	$1,277.59	+1904.4% Qwen3.8 27B (Medium) is 20× more expensive
End-to-end time (lower is better)	10.12s	55.72s	+450.6% Qwen3.8 27B (Medium) is 450.6% slower
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$0.05 / $0.20	$0.50 / $3.00
Input modalities	Text	Text, Image, Video

Qwen3.8 27B (Medium) vs NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning): 210.1% more intelligence, 1904.4% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 450.6% slower end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning): what beats it Qwen3.8 27B (Medium): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Haiku 5.5 (Medium) scores 34.50 for $56.4.
Qwen3.8 27B (Medium) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Max) scores 51.80 for $1082.

NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)Qwen3.8 27B (Medium)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/nvidia-nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b-reasoning/qwen3-8-27b-medium · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/nvidia-nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b-reasoning/qwen3-8-27b-medium?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill