Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between Alibaba / Qwen's Qwen3 235B-A22B and xAI's Grok 4.6 Mini.
| Metric | Qwen3 235B-A22B | Grok 4.6 Mini | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | Alibaba / Qwen | xAI | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $0.90 | $0.40 | Grok 4.6 Mini (56% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.18 | $0.10 | Grok 4.6 Mini lower |
| Output / 1M | $1.60 | $1.60 | Identical |
| Context Window | 128k | 512k | Grok 4.6 Mini (512k) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 32k | 64k | Grok 4.6 Mini |
| Tokenizer Family | Qwen SentencePiece BPE (152k vocabulary) | OpenAI o200k_base legacy (200k vocabulary) | — |
Opt for Qwen3 235B-A22B when your engineering requirements prioritize Alibaba / Qwen's ecosystem, specific tokenizer efficiencies (Calibrated Qwen Tokenizer (±2%)), or when your expected prompt-to-completion ratios favor its $0.9/M input rate.
Opt for Grok 4.6 Mini when looking for xAI's tooling integration, specific context window depth (512k tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $1.6/M rate.