Is Qwen3 32B a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats Qwen3 32B on both quality and price, and what you give up if it does. A computation on the current catalogue, not an opinion.
12 undominated of 144 · Oct 16, 2026
As of Oct 16, 2026, Qwen3 32B is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. GLM 5.3 Flash scores 131.0 higher and costs 4% less, with a covering envelope. 12 of 144 rated, priced standard models are undominated. GLM 5.3 Flash: Price under confirmation since Oct 12, 2026.
Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements
GLM 5.3 Flash is both better and cheaper than Qwen3 32B: 131.0 points higher on LMArena and 4% less per million tokens, $0.010 cheaper at this mix.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1340.0
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.248/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1471.0
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.238/M
Price under confirmation since Oct 12, 2026Qwen3 32B takes text, returns up to 16,384 tokens from a 131,072-token context, and is listed by 3 sellers.
Compared against 144 rated, priced models on this lens: 13 models dominate it and give up nothing, 3 more dominate it but give something up. Qwen3 32B scores 1340 at $0.248 per million tokens for this mix.
Envelope-safe replacements
Each row scores at least as high, costs no more, and covers this model’s context, output, modalities, tools, and reasoning. A cheaper narrower model is not listed here.
| Model | LMArena | Effective $/M | You save |
|---|---|---|---|
| GLM 5.3 Flash | 1471.0 +131.0 | $0.238/MPrice under confirmation since Oct 12, 2026 | 4% |
| DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | 1462.5 +122.5 | $0.182/MPrice under confirmation since Oct 12, 2026 | 26% |
| MiMo-V2.6-Flash | 1455.2 +115.2 | $0.168/M | 32% |
| Gemma 4 31B | 1442.9 +102.9 | $0.205/M | 17% |
| Hy3 | 1437.4 +97.4 | $0.231/M | 7% |
| Gemma 4 26B A4B | 1433.9 +93.9 | $0.128/M | 48% |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 | 1432.2 +92.2 | $0.113/MPrice under confirmation since Oct 12, 2026 | 55% |
| MiMo-V2.5 | 1427.8 +87.8 | $0.175/M | 29% |
| Step 3.5 Flash | 1402.8 +62.8 | $0.150/M | 39% |
| Qwen3.5-Flash | 1397.2 +57.2 | $0.114/M | 54% |
| GPT-6 Luna | 1391.5 +51.5 | $0.200/M | 19% |
| gpt-oss-120b | 1365.4 +25.4 | $0.060/MPrice under confirmation since Oct 16, 2026 | 76% |
| GLM 4.7 Flash | 1350.6 +10.6 | $0.145/M | 41% |
Higher score, lower price, named losses
Not a drop-in. The loss is why these are not a recommendation.
| Model | LMArena | Effective $/M | You give up |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3 235B A22B Instruct 2507 | 1419.1 | $0.205/M | reasoning |
| Qwen3 30B A3B Instruct 2507 | 1383.7 | $0.143/M | reasoning |
| Gemma 3 27B | 1357.7 | $0.100/M | reasoning |
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Saved decision references
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Constraint: replacements must preserve the model’s capabilities; any losses remain named trade-offs.
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