Is Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct on both quality and price, and what you give up if it does. A computation on the current catalogue, not an opinion.
13 undominated of 136 · Sep 23, 2026
As of Sep 23, 2026, Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. GLM 5.3 Flash scores 51.3 higher and costs 62% less, with a covering envelope. 13 of 136 rated, priced standard models are undominated.
Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements
GLM 5.3 Flash is both better and cheaper than Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct: 51.3 points higher on LMArena and 62% less per million tokens, $0.39 cheaper at this mix.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1420.6
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.632/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1471.9
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.237/M
Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct takes text, image, returns up to 32,768 tokens from a 262,144-token context, and is listed by 5 sellers.
Compared against 136 rated, priced models on this lens: 6 models dominate it and give up nothing, 5 more dominate it but give something up. Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct scores 1420.6 at $0.63 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 +51.3 | $0.237/M | 62% |
| Qwen3.7 Plus | 1454.2 +33.6 | $0.560/M | 11% |
| Gemma 4 26B A4B | 1434.5 +13.9 | $0.143/M | 77% |
| MiniMax M3 | 1433.5 +12.9 | $0.525/M | 17% |
| GPT-5.6 Luna | 1429.9 +9.3 | $0.450/M | 29% |
| MiMo-V2.5 | 1427.4 +6.8 | $0.175/M | 72% |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| MiMo-V2.5-Pro | 1464.8 | $0.544/M | image |
| Gemma 4 31B | 1441.7 | $0.153/M | max output |
| Hy3 | 1440.6 | $0.144/M | image |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 | 1431.8 | $0.103/M | image |
| DeepSeek V3.2 | 1424.8 | $0.302/M | context, image |
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Constraint: replacements must preserve the model’s capabilities; any losses remain named trade-offs.
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