Gemini 2.5 Flash vs Qwen 3
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemini 2.5 Flash is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (80 vs 30 on our capability index).
- •Qwen 3 is open-weights (free to self-host); Gemini 2.5 Flash is paid API only.
- •Qwen 3 has a 128K tokens (32K for 0.6B/1.7B/4B dense variants) context window vs 1,048,576 tokens (1M) input; up to 65,535 output - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Gemini 2.5 Flash | Qwen 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Google DeepMind | Alibaba (Qwen Team) |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | 1,048,576 tokens (1M) input; up to 65,535 output | ✓128K tokens (32K for 0.6B/1.7B/4B dense variants) |
| Input / 1M tokens | $0.30 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $2.50 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2025-06 | 2025-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Gemini 2.5 Flash | Qwen 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Context window | 1M tokens | - |
| Input price | $0.30/1M | - |
| Qwen3-235B-A22B | - | 235B total / 22B active |
| Qwen3-30B-A3B | - | 30B total / 3B active |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose Gemini 2.5 Flash if...
- →High-volume, latency-sensitive production workloads
- →Chatbots, extraction, classification, and summarization at scale
- →You need decent reasoning but must control costs
Choose Qwen 3 if...
- →You need an open, self-hostable model with a permissive license
- →You want to toggle deep reasoning on or off per request
- →Multilingual applications
- →Efficient inference via MoE with few active parameters