---
title: "Cheaper alternatives to Qwen3.5 397B A17B · Undominated.ai"
canonical: https://undominated.ai/alternatives/qwen__qwen3.5-397b-a17b/
description: "10 models score at least as high as Qwen3.5 397B A17B and cost no more on a balanced workload. 2 give up nothing measurable; the other 8 name what they drop. Measured prices and independent scores."
---

# Cheaper alternatives to Qwen3.5 397B A17B · Undominated.ai

> 10 models score at least as high as Qwen3.5 397B A17B and cost no more on a balanced workload. 2 give up nothing measurable; the other 8 name what they drop. Measured prices and independent scores.

# Cheaper alternatives to Qwen3.5 397B A17B

Qwen · LMArena 1438.3 · $0.877/M on a balanced workload · prices as of 2026-08-28

## 2 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, **10** score at least as high as Qwen3.5 397B A17B and cost no more under at least one workload. **2** 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 Qwen3.5 397B A17B, it is not generated.

## Where it holds

| Workload | Qwen3.5 397B A17B $/M | Better and cheaper | With a trade |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Balanced | $0.877 | 1 | 5 |
| Summarise | $0.487 | 2 | 6 |
| Chat | $1.17 | 1 | 8 |
| Code gen | $1.56 | 1 | 8 |
| Agentic | $0.682 | 2 | 8 |

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 | 1438.3 |
| --- | --- |
| Context window | 262K |
| Max output | 66K |
| Input modes | text, image, video |
| Tool use | yes |
| Extended reasoning | yes |

A replacement has to clear every line above, not just the score. [Full record for Qwen3.5 397B A17B](/models/qwen__qwen3.5-397b-a17b/).

## Better and cheaper, nothing given up 2

Each of these matches or beats Qwen3.5 397B A17B 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 | Gemini 3.7 Flash Google | 1490.2 +51.9 | $0.750 | Balanced −15% Summarise −27% Chat −25% Code gen −20% Agentic −42% |
| 2 | Qwen3.8 27B Qwen | 1440.8 tie | $0.434 summarise | Summarise −11% Agentic −21% |

## 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 +26.7 | $0.544 | Balanced −38% Summarise −32% Chat −59% Code gen −58% Agentic −64% | no image, video input |
| Qwen3.7 Plus Qwen | 1456.2 +17.9 | $0.560 | Balanced −36% Summarise −39% Chat −46% Code gen −44% Agentic −54% | no video input |
| Gemma 4 31B Google | 1441.7 tie | $0.152 | Balanced −83% Summarise −81% Chat −85% Code gen −85% Agentic −85% | 66K → 16K max output |
| Hy3 Tencent | 1441.2 tie | $0.144 | Balanced −84% Summarise −84% Chat −86% Code gen −86% Agentic −88% | no image, video input |
| GLM 4.6 Z.ai | 1439.8 tie | $0.875 | Balanced under 1% less Summarise −5% Chat −16% Code gen −12% Agentic −29% | 262K → 205K context no image, video input |
| Kimi K2.5 Moonshot AI | 1445.2 tie | $0.432 summarise | Summarise −11% Chat −10% Code gen −4% Agentic −28% | no video input |
| GLM 5 Z.ai | 1445.2 tie | $0.984 chat | Chat −16% Code gen −13% Agentic −25% | 262K → 205K context no image, video input |
| DeepSeek V4 Pro 0423 DeepSeek | 1439.2 tie | $0.979 chat | Chat −16% Code gen −15% Agentic −23% | no image, video 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/).