Grok 4.3 vs Qwen3.5 (397B-A17B)

Pick two tools from the same category to compare side-by-side.

	Grok 4.3 xAI's flagship API model, billed as its most intelligent and fastest, with strong agentic tool calling.	Qwen3.5 (397B-A17B) Alibaba's Apache-2.0 open-weight Qwen3.5 flagship MoE with very low active-parameter cost and broad multilingual coverage.
Category	model	model
Vendor type	commercial	open source
Pricing	usage	free
Strengths	+ Aggressive pricing ($1.25 input / $2.50 output per million tokens) for a 1M-context flagship + Vendor-reported leadership in agentic tool calling and instruction following + Companion multi-agent variant (grok-4.20-multi-agent) targeted at agentic workloads	+ Permissive Apache 2.0 license + Only 17B active parameters, enabling comparatively cheap inference + First-class MCP and tool-calling support via Qwen-Agent + 201-language coverage for multilingual agents
Tradeoffs	− Stated knowledge cutoff of November 2024 is older than competing flagships − Rapid model churn; xAI retired eight legacy models (including grok-3) in May 2026, so pinned integrations need active migration	− Long context beyond 262K requires YaRN extension rather than native support − Flagship commercial Qwen3-Max capabilities are not part of the open release
Used in stacks	0	0