Compare / Qwen3.5 35B-A3B vs Seed-OSS 36B Instruct

Qwen3.5 35B-A3B vs Seed-OSS 36B Instruct

Updated November 2026

Verdict

Qwen3.5 35B-A3B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 69.9 vs 60.3. On the 6 benchmarks both labs report, Qwen3.5 35B-A3B wins 6 and Seed-OSS 36B Instruct wins 0. Qwen3.5 35B-A3B is smaller: it needs about 22.6 GB of memory at 4-bit, against 25.3 GB for Seed-OSS 36B Instruct. Only Qwen3.5 35B-A3B has a hosted API on OpenRouter ($0.24 per million tokens); the other has to be self-hosted.

Pick Qwen3.5 35B-A3B if…

you want the strongest model overall
you mostly write code
you need math and reasoning
you have limited memory (about 22.6 GB at 4-bit)
you want a hosted API rather than running it yourself
you need image input
you want the more widely used model (more quantized builds and community support)

Pick Seed-OSS 36B Instruct if…

you work with long documents

Specifications

	Qwen3.5 35B-A3B	Seed-OSS 36B Instruct
Small LM Index	69.9 (likely 69–71)	60.3 (likely 57–64)
Lab	Alibaba (Qwen) · China	ByteDance Seed · China
Released	2026-02-24	2025-08-20
Parameters	35B (3B active, MoE)	36.2B (dense)
Memory at 4-bit	~22.6 GB	~25.3 GB
Context window	262K tokens	512K tokens
Input	text, image, video	text
Reasoning	Hybrid (thinking on/off)	Always thinks
License	Apache-2.0	Apache-2.0
API price / 1M tokens	$0.24 ($0.065 in, $0.75 out)	Self-host only
Hugging Face downloads (30 days)	1.7M	40.7K

Benchmarks

Higher is better. Bold marks the winner where both labs report a score. ≈ marks the index model's estimate for a score that wasn't reported, ✓ an independent measurement and * a score measured by another lab.

Benchmark	Qwen3.5 35B-A3B	Seed-OSS 36B Instruct
MMLU-Pro Knowledge	85.3	82.7
GPQA Diamond Knowledge	84.2	71.4
Humanity's Last Exam Reasoning	22.4	10.1
AIME Math	91.0	84.7
LiveCodeBench Coding	74.6	67.4
SWE-bench Verified Coding	70.0	56.0
Terminal-Bench Agentic	40.5	—
MMMU-Pro Vision	75.1	—
MMLU Knowledge	—	87.4
Multilingual MMLU Multilingual	—	78.4
IFEval Instruction following	—	85.8

Scores are mostly reported by each lab with its own settings, so small gaps are noise. See the methodology. Open in the interactive comparison to add more models.

Questions

Which is better, Qwen3.5 35B-A3B or Seed-OSS 36B Instruct?

Qwen3.5 35B-A3B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 69.9 vs 60.3. On the 6 benchmarks both labs report, Qwen3.5 35B-A3B wins 6 and Seed-OSS 36B Instruct wins 0.

Which is cheaper to run?

Only Qwen3.5 35B-A3B has a hosted API on OpenRouter ($0.24 per million tokens); the other has to be self-hosted. Qwen3.5 35B-A3B is smaller: it needs about 22.6 GB of memory at 4-bit, against 25.3 GB for Seed-OSS 36B Instruct.

Which has the longer context window?

Seed-OSS 36B Instruct has the longer context window: 512K tokens against 262K.

Can I use Qwen3.5 35B-A3B and Seed-OSS 36B Instruct commercially?

Both are released under the Apache-2.0 license. Apache 2.0 and MIT allow commercial use; other licenses can add conditions, so read the license before shipping a product.