o3-mini vs Qwen3.5-35B-A3B

Pick Qwen3.5-35B-A3B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. o3-mini only becomes the better choice if instruction following is the priority.

Qwen3.5-35B-A3B finishes one point ahead on BenchLM's provisional leaderboard, 56 to 55. That is enough to call, but not enough to treat as a blowout. This matchup comes down to a few meaningful edges rather than one model dominating the board.

Qwen3.5-35B-A3B's sharpest advantage is in coding, where it averages 58.4 against 49.3. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is SWE-bench Verified, 49.3% to 69.2%. o3-mini does hit back in instruction following, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

o3-mini is also the more expensive model on tokens at $1.10 input / $4.40 output per 1M tokens, versus $0.00 input / $0.00 output per 1M tokens for Qwen3.5-35B-A3B. That is roughly Infinityx on output cost alone. Qwen3.5-35B-A3B gives you the larger context window at 262K, compared with 200K for o3-mini.