Grok 4 vs Qwen3-235B-A22B
Benchmarks, API pricing and specs, head to head. Data updated 2026-06-10.
xAI · Jul 2025
xAI's mid-2025 flagship, trained on the 200K-GPU Colossus cluster — a math and science reasoning standout of its generation.
Alibaba (Qwen) · Jul 2025
The most popular open general-purpose Qwen: 235B MoE with hybrid thinking, a staple of the 2025 open-source ecosystem.
The verdict
Grok 4 wins 2 of the 3 benchmarks these models share, against 1 for Qwen3-235B-A22B. On price the gap is dramatic: Qwen3-235B-A22B works out roughly 16x cheaper per blended million tokens. Qwen3-235B-A22B also takes 262K of context versus 256K for Grok 4. And Qwen3-235B-A22B is open-weights (Apache 2.0), so it can be self-hosted — a structural advantage if data control or vendor independence matters.
Benchmark head-to-head 2–1
Specs & pricing
| Grok 4 | Qwen3-235B-A22B | |
|---|---|---|
| modhub Index | — | 69.0 |
| Input price / 1M | $3 | $0.22 |
| Output price / 1M | $15 | $0.88 |
| Context window | 256K | 262K |
| Max output | — | 33K |
| Open weights | no | yes (Apache 2.0) |
| Reasoning model | yes | yes |
| Multimodal input | text, image | text |
| Knowledge cutoff | Jul 2025 | Apr 2025 |
| Released | Jul 2025 | Jul 2025 |
| Example monthly cost* | $52.50 | $3.52 |
* 10M input + 1.5M output tokens per month at list prices, no caching. Green = better value on that row.
Frequently asked questions
- Which is better, Grok 4 or Qwen3-235B-A22B?
- Grok 4 wins 2 of the 3 benchmarks these models share, against 1 for Qwen3-235B-A22B. On price the gap is dramatic: Qwen3-235B-A22B works out roughly 16x cheaper per blended million tokens. Qwen3-235B-A22B also takes 262K of context versus 256K for Grok 4. And Qwen3-235B-A22B is open-weights (Apache 2.0), so it can be self-hosted — a structural advantage if data control or vendor independence matters.
- Which is cheaper, Grok 4 or Qwen3-235B-A22B?
- Grok 4 costs $3/$15 per million input/output tokens, while Qwen3-235B-A22B costs $0.22/$0.88. For a typical workload of 10M input and 1.5M output tokens per month, that's $52.50 versus $3.52.
- Which model is better for coding, Grok 4 or Qwen3-235B-A22B?
- We don't yet track SWE-bench Verified results for both models; check their individual pages for coding-related scores.