Llama 4 Scout vs Qwen3.6 35B A3B: accuracy, speed and price

• Accuracy is too close to call: Llama 4 Scout scored 41.2% and Qwen3.6 35B A3B 37.5% on the same 80 questions, a gap within what chance alone could produce.
• Llama 4 Scout is 10× cheaper per question as billed ($0.00037 vs $0.0037), reasoning tokens included.
• Qwen3.6 35B A3B generates text 8.8× faster: 135 tokens per second against 15.
• Qwen3.6 35B A3B starts answering sooner: 0.4 s to the first token, against 1.2 s for Llama 4 Scout.
• Llama 4 Scout accepts more context: 1.3M tokens against 262k.

Which should you choose?

Choose Llama 4 Scout for the lower cost per correct answer ($0.0009 against $0.0099), shorter outputs (about 723 tokens per question against 3,563) and a 1.3M-token context window. Choose Qwen3.6 35B A3B for faster streaming, a quicker first token and more hosts to choose from on OpenRouter (10 against 2).

Accuracy gap +3.7 points (z = 0.49). We call a winner only when z is at least 1.96, the usual 95% threshold. Speed, latency and price need a 10% margin.