Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between xAI's Grok 2 mini and Alibaba / Qwen's Qwen3 235B-A22B.
• Grok 2 mini: Classified as a Legacy Reference model (Generally Available).
| Metric | Grok 2 mini | Qwen3 235B-A22B | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | xAI | Alibaba / Qwen | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $0.20 | $0.90 | Grok 2 mini (78% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | None | $0.18 | Qwen3 235B-A22B lower |
| Output / 1M | $1.00 | $1.60 | Grok 2 mini lower |
| Context Window | 128k | 128k | Equal |
| Max Generation Tokens | 8.2k | 32k | Qwen3 235B-A22B |
| Tokenizer Family | xAI Byte-level BPE (~131k vocabulary) | Qwen SentencePiece BPE (152k vocabulary) | — |
Opt for Grok 2 mini when your engineering requirements prioritize xAI's ecosystem, specific tokenizer efficiencies (Calibrated xAI Tokenizer (±3%)), or when your expected prompt-to-completion ratios favor its $0.2/M input rate.
Opt for Qwen3 235B-A22B when looking for Alibaba / Qwen's tooling integration, specific context window depth (128k tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $1.6/M rate.