Is Qwen3.5-27B a good deal?

As of Oct 16, 2026, Qwen3.5-27B is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. GLM 5.3 Flash scores 62.0 higher and costs 56% 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.

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GLM 5.3 Flash is both better and cheaper than Qwen3.5-27B: 62.0 points higher on LMArena and 56% less per million tokens, $0.299 cheaper at this mix.

Qwen3.5-27B takes text, image, video, returns up to 81,920 tokens from a 262,144-token context, and is listed by 7 sellers.

Compared against 144 rated, priced models on this lens: 5 models dominate it and give up nothing, 5 more dominate it but give something up. Qwen3.5-27B scores 1409 at $0.536 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 +62.0	$0.238/MPrice under confirmation since Oct 12, 2026	56%
MiMo-V2.6-Flash	1455.2 +46.2	$0.168/M	69%
Gemma 4 26B A4B	1433.9 +24.9	$0.128/M	76%
MiniMax M3	1433.4 +24.4	$0.485/M	10%
MiMo-V2.5	1427.8 +18.8	$0.175/M	67%

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
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash	1462.5	$0.182/MPrice under confirmation since Oct 12, 2026	video
Gemma 4 31B	1442.9	$0.205/M	max output
Hy3	1437.4	$0.231/M	image, video
DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423	1432.2	$0.113/MPrice under confirmation since Oct 12, 2026	image, video
GPT-5.6 Luna	1430.6	$0.450/M	video

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