---
title: "Cheaper alternatives to Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct · Undominated.ai"
canonical: https://undominated.ai/alternatives/qwen__qwen3-vl-235b-a22b-instruct/
description: "12 models score at least as high as Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct and cost no more on a balanced workload. 4 give up nothing measurable; the other 8 name what they drop. Measured prices and independent scores."
---

# Cheaper alternatives to Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct · Undominated.ai

> 12 models score at least as high as Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct and cost no more on a balanced workload. 4 give up nothing measurable; the other 8 name what they drop. Measured prices and independent scores.

# Cheaper alternatives to Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct

Qwen · LMArena 1420.9 · $0.632/M on a balanced workload · prices as of 2026-08-28

## 4 models are both better and cheaper, giving up nothing.

Of the 133 models carrying both an independent score and a published price at the same delivery mode, **12** score at least as high as Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct and cost no more under at least one workload. **4** match or beat it on every capability we hold — context, maximum output, input modes, tool use and extended reasoning. **8** do not, and every row names what it drops.

Dominance is not a property of a model. It is a property of a model, a capability lens and a workload, and all three are named on every row. Scores are LMArena Elo, used under CC BY 4.0 from the official dataset; prices are blended per million tokens. A higher score is not a drop-in replacement.

This page is built from that comparison and nothing else. When no model is both better and cheaper than Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct, it is not generated.

## Where it holds

| Workload | Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct $/M | Better and cheaper | With a trade |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Balanced | $0.632 | 4 | 7 |
| Summarise | $0.263 | 2 | 5 |
| Chat | $0.853 | 4 | 8 |
| Code gen | $1.22 | 4 | 8 |
| Agentic | $0.398 | 4 | 7 |

Workload mixes are defined on the [methodology page](/methodology/). Cached input is priced at the cached rate, and reasoning tokens at the worse of the reasoning and output rates.

## What you would be replacing

| Intelligence | 1420.9 |
| --- | --- |
| Context window | 262K |
| Max output | 33K |
| Input modes | text, image |
| Tool use | yes |
| Extended reasoning | no |

A replacement has to clear every line above, not just the score. [Full record for Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct](/models/qwen__qwen3-vl-235b-a22b-instruct/).

## Better and cheaper, nothing given up 4

Each of these matches or beats Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct on context, maximum output, input modes, tool use and reasoning, scores at least as high, and costs no more.

| # | Model | Intelligence | $/M | Holds under |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | Qwen3.7 Plus Qwen | 1456.2 +35.3 | $0.560 | Balanced −11% Chat −26% Code gen −28% Agentic −22% |
| 2 | MiniMax M3 MiniMax | 1434.8 +13.9 | $0.525 | Balanced −17% Chat −31% Code gen −32% Agentic −27% |
| 3 | MiMo-V2.5 Xiaomi | 1427.3 tie | $0.175 | Balanced −72% Summarise −59% Chat −82% Code gen −82% Agentic −80% |
| 4 | GPT-5.6 Luna OpenAI | 1428.5 tie | $0.450 | Balanced −29% Summarise −24% Chat −36% Code gen −35% Agentic −39% |

## Cheaper and higher-scoring, but you give something up 8

These score at least as high and cost no more on the two plotted axes, and lose something that is not on them. Read the last column before switching.

| Model | Intelligence | $/M | Holds under | What you give up |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| MiMo-V2.5-Pro Xiaomi | 1465 +44.1 | $0.544 | Balanced −14% Chat −44% Code gen −46% Agentic −39% | no image input |
| Gemma 4 31B Google | 1441.7 +20.8 | $0.152 | Balanced −76% Summarise −65% Chat −79% Code gen −81% Agentic −74% | 33K → 16K max output |
| Hy3 Tencent | 1441.2 +20.3 | $0.144 | Balanced −77% Summarise −71% Chat −81% Code gen −81% Agentic −79% | no image input |
| Gemma 4 26B A4B Google | 1434.6 +13.7 | $0.138 | Balanced −78% Summarise −68% Chat −79% Code gen −81% Agentic −72% | 33K → 16K max output |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 DeepSeek | 1431.6 +10.7 | $0.101 | Balanced −84% Summarise −75% Chat −89% Code gen −90% Agentic −86% | no image input |
| DeepSeek V3.2 DeepSeek | 1424.6 tie | $0.290 | Balanced −54% Summarise −13% Chat −68% Code gen −74% Agentic −50% | 262K → 164K context no image input |
| DeepSeek V3.2 Exp DeepSeek | 1424.4 tie | $0.305 | Balanced −52% Chat −62% Code gen −71% Agentic −27% | 262K → 164K context no image input |
| GLM 4.7 Z.ai | 1435.3 +14.4 | $0.844 chat | Chat −1% Code gen −3% | 262K → 205K context no image input |

## What this compares, and what it leaves out

 - Quality is LMArena Elo, used under CC BY 4.0 from the official dataset. The 95% confidence interval on a difference between two scores is about ±10.68 points, so a gap smaller than that is marked *tie* rather than an improvement — see [significance bands](/significance/).
 - 188 further models at this delivery mode carry a price but no independent score. They are absent from the comparison in both directions — unrated is not a zero, and an unmeasured model is neither an alternative nor a worse buy.
 - Retired models are never offered as an alternative, and a model only competes against its own delivery mode: batch trades latency for price, so it is not a like-for-like swap.
 - Nothing here measures latency, throughput, rate limits or how a model behaves on your prompts. Two models with the same index score are not interchangeable.
 - The models that nothing beats on both axes are on the [value frontier](/frontier/), and every other model something cheaper beats is [listed here](/alternatives/).