Verdict
Built from the measurements below
- Accuracy is too close to call: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) scored 75.0% and Qwen3 Coder Next 62.5% on the same 80 questions, a gap within what chance alone could produce.
- Qwen3 Coder Next is 6.6× cheaper per question as billed ($0.0017 vs $0.011), reasoning tokens included.
- Qwen3 Coder Next generates text 2.3× faster: 106 tokens per second against 46.
- Qwen3 Coder Next starts answering sooner: 0.4 s to the first token, against 1.2 s for Qwen3.8 Max (0902).
- Qwen3.8 Max (0902) accepts more context: 1M tokens against 262k.
Which should you choose?
Choose Qwen3.8 Max (0902) for a 1M-token context window. Choose Qwen3 Coder Next for the lower cost per correct answer ($0.0027 against $0.015), faster streaming, a quicker first token and open weights you can run yourself. The widest subject gap is in engineering: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) answered 9 of 15 correctly, Qwen3 Coder Next 6 of 15. With so few questions per subject, treat this as a lead to test on your own prompts, not a result.
Accuracy gap +12.5 points (z = 1.71). We call a winner only when z is at least 1.96, the usual 95% threshold. Speed, latency and price need a 10% margin.