Qwen3.5-9B is a multimodal foundation model from the Qwen3.5 family, designed to deliver strong reasoning, coding, and visual understanding in an efficient 9B-parameter architecture. It uses a unified vision-language design with early fusio…
Model details →Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B vs StepFun: Step 3.5 Flash (free)
StepFun: Step 3.5 Flash (free) wins on 2 of 6 axes — pricing and capability skew in its favour for most workloads.
Step 3.5 Flash is StepFun's most capable open-source foundation model. Built on a sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, it selectively activates only 11B of its 196B parameters per token. It is a reasoning model that is incredibly s…
Model details →Side-by-side comparison
| Capability | Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B | StepFun: Step 3.5 Flash (free) | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Context window Maximum number of input tokens the model can attend to in a single request. | 256K | 256K | Tie |
| Input price (per 1M) Cost per million input tokens billed by the provider. | $0.05 | $0.00 | 🏆 StepFun: Step 3.5 Flash (free) |
| Output price (per 1M) Cost per million output tokens billed by the provider. | $0.15 | $0.00 | 🏆 StepFun: Step 3.5 Flash (free) |
| Tool / function calling First-class support for emitting structured tool calls. | Yes | Yes | Tie |
| Vision input Accepts image inputs alongside text. | Yes | — | 🏆 Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B |
| Reasoning mode Internal chain-of-thought / extended-thinking support. | Yes | Yes | Tie |
Frequently asked questions
Is Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B better than StepFun: Step 3.5 Flash (free)?
StepFun: Step 3.5 Flash (free) wins on 2 of 6 axes — pricing and capability skew in its favour for most workloads.
What's the price difference between Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B and StepFun: Step 3.5 Flash (free)?
Input: $0.05 vs $0.00 per 1M tokens. Output: $0.15 vs $0.00 per 1M tokens.
What context windows do Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B and StepFun: Step 3.5 Flash (free) support?
Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B supports up to 256K tokens. StepFun: Step 3.5 Flash (free) supports up to 256K tokens.
Do both Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B and StepFun: Step 3.5 Flash (free) support tool calling?
Qwen: Qwen3.5-9B: yes. StepFun: Step 3.5 Flash (free): yes.