Qwen3.8 27B vs Qwen3 Coder Next: accuracy, speed and price

• Accuracy is too close to call: Qwen3.8 27B scored 63.8% and Qwen3 Coder Next 62.5% on the same 80 questions, a gap within what chance alone could produce.
• Qwen3 Coder Next is 2.6× cheaper per question as billed ($0.0017 vs $0.0043), reasoning tokens included.
• Qwen3 Coder Next generates text 2.2× faster: 106 tokens per second against 49.
• Qwen3 Coder Next starts answering sooner: 0.4 s to the first token, against 0.5 s for Qwen3.8 27B.
• Qwen3.8 27B accepts more context: 1M tokens against 262k.

Which should you choose?

Choose Qwen3.8 27B for a 1M-token context window and more hosts to choose from on OpenRouter (21 against 1). Choose Qwen3 Coder Next for the lower cost per correct answer ($0.0027 against $0.0067), faster streaming and a quicker first token.

Accuracy gap +1.2 points (z = 0.16). We call a winner only when z is at least 1.96, the usual 95% threshold. Speed, latency and price need a 10% margin.