Kimi K3 vs Qwen3 235B benchmark

Side-by-Side Benchmark Matrix

Recommended Workload Routing

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better overall, Kimi K3 or Qwen3 235B?

Kimi K3 has the higher preference Elo in our latest snapshot (1,528). “Better” still depends on coding, price, and latency — see the table.

Which is better at coding, Kimi K3 or Qwen3 235B?

Kimi K3 leads SWE-bench at 73.8% vs 59.4%. SWE-bench is one harness, not your repo.

Which is cheaper to run in production?

Qwen3 235B output tokens are $0.88/1M versus $2.5/1M. Input prices and retry rates still move the real bill.

Which is faster, Kimi K3 or Qwen3 235B?

Kimi K3 has the lower time-to-first-token (290 ms vs 320 ms). Tokens/sec is a separate column if you care about long completions.

Which has the larger context window?

Kimi K3 accepts 262k tokens versus 131k.

Can I self-host either model?

Qwen3 235B is marked open-weights in our catalog. The other side is a closed API. Check the provider license before you ship weights.

Are these scores from CompareLLM’s own evals?

No. V1 aggregates public leaderboards (and optional first-party latency pings). Each cell names its source and date. Read /methodology.

What does preference Elo mean on this page?

Preference Elo is a crowd vote from LMArena / Arena. People see two hidden answers and pick the one they like more. The model that wins more often gets a higher Elo. That means people preferred it — not that it passed a school test. It is not SWE-bench, not accuracy, and not a number we invent. Kimi K3 and Qwen3 235B Elo cells are dated snapshots from the named source — we do not compute Arena ourselves.