Is Qwen3.5 397B A17B a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats Qwen3.5 397B A17B 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, Qwen3.5 397B A17B is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. GLM 5.3 Flash scores 33.6 higher and costs 82% 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 Qwen3.5 397B A17B: 33.6 points higher on LMArena and 82% less per million tokens, $1.05 cheaper at this mix.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1438.3
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$1.29/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1471.9
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.237/M
Qwen3.5 397B A17B takes text, image, video, returns up to 235,929 tokens from a 262,144-token context, and is listed by 10 sellers.
Compared against 136 rated, priced models on this lens: 1 model dominates it and gives up nothing, 5 more dominate it but give something up. Qwen3.5 397B A17B scores 1438.3 at $1.29 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 +33.6 | $0.237/M | 82% |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| GLM 5.2 | 1466.9 | $0.998/M | max output, image, video |
| MiMo-V2.5-Pro | 1464.8 | $0.544/M | max output, image, video |
| Qwen3.7 Plus | 1454.2 | $0.560/M | max output, video |
| GLM 5 | 1446.3 | $0.930/M | context, max output, image, video |
| Kimi K2.5 | 1445.6 | $0.900/M | video |
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Constraint: replacements must preserve the model’s capabilities; any losses remain named trade-offs.
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