// head_to_head
Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite vs Qwen3.6 27B
Published LiveBench scores across all seven categories, live list pricing, context windows, and the measured cost of a point of capability — for both models, side by side.
Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite and Qwen3.6 27B are close on both score and price.
Neither model separates itself on published score or list price. Pick on the things this table cannot measure: latency under your load, context window headroom, tool-calling reliability, and whichever provider you already have a contract with.
Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite
- Blended / 1M
- $0.850
- Context
- 1.0M
- Released
- Jul 21, 2026
- Overall score
- 63.9
qwen
Qwen3.6 27B
- Blended / 1M
- $0.915
- Context
- 262K
- Released
- Apr 27, 2026
- Overall score
- 64.0
Specs and pricing
| Metric | Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 63.9 | 64.0 |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $0.0379win | $0.1074 |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $0.850 | $0.915 |
| Input price / 1M | $0.300 | $0.320 |
| Output price / 1M | $2.50 | $2.70 |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.030win | $0.150 |
| Context window | 1.0Mwin | 262K |
| Max output tokens | 66K | 262Kwin |
Benchmarks by category
An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite on top, Qwen3.6 27B below, both out of 100.
What each one costs to run
Per-token prices are hard to feel. These are monthly list costs for both models across five workload shapes, using each provider's published cached-input rate where there is one.
| Workload | Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $252.56/mo | $280.56/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $282.00/mo | $350.00/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $288.80/mo | $376.80/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $474.00/mo | $514.00/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $865.00/mo | $985.00/mo |
Which should you pick?
You are running this at volume
Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite
Lowest measured cost per point of capability at $0.0379 per point — the gap compounds with every request.
The workload is coding or agentic work
Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite
Leads on agentic coding — 45.3 against 39.3.
You need to fit large documents in one call
Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite
Wider context window — 1.0M against 262K.
Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite vs Qwen3.6 27B FAQ
Which is better, Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite or Qwen3.6 27B?
Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite and Qwen3.6 27B are close on both score and price. Neither model separates itself on published score or list price. Pick on the things this table cannot measure: latency under your load, context window headroom, tool-calling reliability, and whichever provider you already have a contract with.
Is Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite cheaper than Qwen3.6 27B?
They cost about the same. Both land near $0.850 per million tokens on a 3:1 input:output blend, so price is unlikely to be the deciding factor between them.
Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite vs Qwen3.6 27B: which scores higher on benchmarks?
Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite scores 63.9 and Qwen3.6 27B scores 64.0 overall on LiveBench, the mean of its seven categories. That gap is inside the range that effort settings alone move a score, so treat them as equivalent on published quality. Category scores differ from the overall figure — a model can lead on reasoning and trail on coding, which the per-category table above breaks out.
Which gives better value for money, Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite or Qwen3.6 27B?
Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite. Cost per point divides the measured dollars LiveBench spent running the benchmark by the score it earned, so it captures something token pricing misses: a reasoning model can emit many times more tokens than its per-token rate suggests. Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite works out at $0.0379 per point and Qwen3.6 27B at $0.1074.
Does Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite or Qwen3.6 27B have a bigger context window?
Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite has the larger context window: 1.0M for Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite against 262K for Qwen3.6 27B. Note that a window you can fill is not a window you should fill — retrieval quality usually degrades well before the limit, and you pay for every token you put in it.
Do Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite and Qwen3.6 27B support prompt caching?
Both publish a cached-input rate: $0.030 per million for Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite and $0.150 for Qwen3.6 27B, against full input rates of $0.300 and $0.320. On a workload with a long stable prefix — a system prompt, a tool schema, a retrieved corpus — that changes the economics more than the headline price does.
Related comparisons
How these numbers are produced
- Price — provider list price from OpenRouter, refreshed every 15 minutes. “Blended” is a 3:1 input:output mix.
- Scores — LiveBench release 2026-06-25, using their own category map. Each model shows its strongest published run. A blank means “not evaluated”, never “bad”.
- Cost per point — the measured dollars LiveBench spent on the run, divided by the score it earned.
- “Win” — awarded only past a threshold: one full point on a benchmark score, 10% on a price, 25% on a context window. Anything tighter reports as a tie, because effort settings alone move a LiveBench score by more than that.
Published benchmarks rank models on someone else's tasks. Before committing, see LLM & agent evaluation for building an eval on your own.