Is Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Thinking a good deal?

As of Sep 23, 2026, Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Thinking is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. GLM 5.3 Flash scores 104.1 higher and costs 42% less, with a covering envelope. 13 of 136 rated, priced standard models are undominated.

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GLM 5.3 Flash is both better and cheaper than Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Thinking: 104.1 points higher on LMArena and 42% less per million tokens, $0.17 cheaper at this mix.

Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Thinking takes text, returns up to 235,929 tokens from a 262,144-token context, and is listed by 2 sellers.

Compared against 136 rated, priced models on this lens: 3 models dominate it and give up nothing, 5 more dominate it but give something up. Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Thinking scores 1367.8 at $0.41 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	1471.9 +104.1	$0.237/M	42%
Gemma 4 26B A4B	1434.5 +66.7	$0.143/M	65%
DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423	1431.8 +64.0	$0.103/M	75%

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
Gemma 4 31B	1441.7	$0.153/M	max output
Hy3	1440.6	$0.144/M	max output
MiMo-V2.5	1427.4	$0.175/M	max output
DeepSeek V3.2	1424.8	$0.302/M	context, max output
DeepSeek V3.2 Exp	1422.6	$0.305/M	context, max output

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