// head_to_head

Kimi K2.7 Code vs Qwen3.8 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.

OpenRouter + LiveBenchAll comparisonsFull leaderboard

Qwen3.8 27B wins outright — it scores higher and costs less.

Qwen3.8 27B leads by 6.9 points overall while listing 19% cheaper per blended million tokens. There is no trade-off to reason about here; the only reason to pick the other is a constraint this table does not show, like an existing contract, a region, or a provider you are already on.

moonshotai

Kimi K2.7 Code

Blended / 1M
$1.35
Context
262K
Released
Jun 12, 2026
Overall score
68.4
reasoningtool callingimage inputprompt caching

qwen

Qwen3.8 27B

Blended / 1M
$1.14
Context
1M
Released
Aug 14, 2026
Overall score
75.3
reasoningtool callingimage inputvideo inputprompt caching

Specs and pricing

MetricKimi K2.7 CodeQwen3.8 27B
LiveBench overall

Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better.

68.475.3win
Cost per point

Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability.

$0.0545$0.0556
Blended price / 1M

3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic.

$1.35$1.14win
Input price / 1M$0.670$0.450win
Output price / 1M$3.40$3.20
Cached input / 1M

Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one.

$0.170$0.050win
Context window262K1Mwin
Max output tokens262Kwin131K

Benchmarks by category

An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — Kimi K2.7 Code on top, Qwen3.8 27B below, both out of 100.

Agentic coding
45.7
61.4
Coding
74.0
75.7
Reasoning
82.8
80.0
Mathematics
79.6
86.2
Data analysis
62.7
76.6
Language
77.9
74.3
Instruction following
56.3
72.7

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.

WorkloadKimi K2.7 CodeQwen3.8 27B
Support chatbot

1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests

$396.80/mo$335.20/mo
RAG assistant

8K in / 600 out × 100K requests

$540.00/mo$392.00/mo
Coding agent

40K in / 4K out × 20K requests

$528.00/mo$392.00/mo
Document extraction

20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests

$900.00/mo$670.00/mo
Bulk classification

500 in / 20 out × 5M requests

$1765.00/mo$1245.00/mo
Run these two through the cost calculator

Which should you pick?

Quality matters more than the bill

Qwen3.8 27B

Highest overall LiveBench score of the two at 75.3.

The workload is coding or agentic work

Qwen3.8 27B

Leads on agentic coding — 61.4 against 45.7.

You need to fit large documents in one call

Qwen3.8 27B

Wider context window — 1M against 262K.

Kimi K2.7 Code vs Qwen3.8 27B FAQ

Which is better, Kimi K2.7 Code or Qwen3.8 27B?

Qwen3.8 27B wins outright — it scores higher and costs less. Qwen3.8 27B leads by 6.9 points overall while listing 19% cheaper per blended million tokens. There is no trade-off to reason about here; the only reason to pick the other is a constraint this table does not show, like an existing contract, a region, or a provider you are already on.

Is Kimi K2.7 Code cheaper than Qwen3.8 27B?

Qwen3.8 27B is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, Kimi K2.7 Code lists at $1.35 per million tokens and Qwen3.8 27B at $1.14 — Qwen3.8 27B is 19% cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — Kimi K2.7 Code charges $0.670 in and $3.40 out, Qwen3.8 27B charges $0.450 and $3.20 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.

Kimi K2.7 Code vs Qwen3.8 27B: which scores higher on benchmarks?

Kimi K2.7 Code scores 68.4 and Qwen3.8 27B scores 75.3 overall on LiveBench, the mean of its seven categories. That is a 6.9-point lead for Qwen3.8 27B. 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, Kimi K2.7 Code or Qwen3.8 27B?

They are close. Kimi K2.7 Code costs $0.0545 per point of overall capability and Qwen3.8 27B costs $0.0556, a difference small enough that workload shape will matter more than the rate.

Does Kimi K2.7 Code or Qwen3.8 27B have a bigger context window?

Qwen3.8 27B has the larger context window: 262K for Kimi K2.7 Code against 1M for Qwen3.8 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 Kimi K2.7 Code and Qwen3.8 27B support prompt caching?

Both publish a cached-input rate: $0.170 per million for Kimi K2.7 Code and $0.050 for Qwen3.8 27B, against full input rates of $0.670 and $0.450. 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.
  • ScoresLiveBench 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.