Model vs model
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B vs Qwen3.5 9B
At a glance
Longer bar means the bigger number.
Open or closed · can you download the model and run it yourself?
Blended price · per 1M tokens, lower is better
Intelligence Index · Artificial Analysis, higher is better
Where they sit among all 45 models
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B ranks 38th of the 44 models with an Intelligence Index, Qwen3.5 9B 37th. Up and to the left is smarter for less money. Hover or tap a dot for its numbers, then click it to compare that model with Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B.
Which one to pick
Pick Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B if
- you want the lower bill ($0.09 vs $0.11 per 1M tokens blended)
- you care about AA-LCR (long documents): 60.3 vs 46
How smart is each one?
Of the 5 scores both models have, Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B is ahead on 3 and Qwen3.5 9B on 1, and one is within a point.
Every intelligence score we have
Out of 100, higher is better. Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B Qwen3.5 9B
Overall
Intelligence Index
12.9 · 13.3
By area
Coding
26.823.5Agentic work
3.5Qwen3.5 9B: not scored yet
By field of work
Finance & accounting
12.2Qwen3.5 9B: not scored yet
Legal
15.5Qwen3.5 9B: not scored yet
Healthcare & medicine
11.7Qwen3.5 9B: not scored yet
Economics
22.8Qwen3.5 9B: not scored yet
Engineering
18.1Qwen3.5 9B: not scored yet
Strategy & operations
6.9Qwen3.5 9B: not scored yet
Benchmarks
Hard reasoning · Humanity's Last Exam
10.69.4Science · GPQA Diamond
74.378.6Scientific coding · SciCode
32.1Qwen3.5 9B: not scored yet
Terminal tasks · Terminal-Bench 4.0
0.5Qwen3.5 9B: not scored yet
Tool use · τ-Bench Banking
8.9Qwen3.5 9B: not scored yet
Instruction following · IFBench
37.8Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B: not scored yet
Long documents · AA-LCR
60.346
The specs
| Spec | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B | Qwen3.5 9B |
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $0.05 per 1M | $0.10 per 1M |
| Output price | $0.20 per 1M | $0.15 per 1M |
| Cost per test task | Not tested | Not tested |
| Context window | 262K | 262K |
| Max output | 131K | 33K |
| Accepts | Text | Text |
| Open weights | Yes | Yes |
| Lab | NVIDIA | Alibaba |
| Released | Aug 2026 | Mar 2026 |
| Knowledge cutoff | Sep 2025 | Not published |
Blended price weighs 3 parts input to 1 part output. List prices from models.dev.
Questions
Is Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B or Qwen3.5 9B cheaper?
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B is cheaper. It charges $0.05 per 1M input tokens and $0.20 per 1M output tokens, against $0.10 and $0.15 for Qwen3.5 9B. Blended 3 parts input to 1 part output, that is $0.09 against $0.11 per 1M tokens.
Are Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B and Qwen3.5 9B open source?
Both are open-weights models: NVIDIA and Alibaba publish the weights, so you can download them and run them on your own hardware, or call them through any host's API. Check each model's license before you ship it.
Which is smarter, Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B or Qwen3.5 9B?
They score about the same on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index: Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B 12.9, Qwen3.5 9B 13.3. The biggest differences are on AA-LCR (60.3 vs 46) and GPQA Diamond (74.3 vs 78.6).
Which has the longer context window?
Both accept 262K tokens.
Can I compare Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B and Qwen3.5 9B on my own prompt?
Yes. ModelCompare sends one prompt to both models at once and shows each answer side by side with what it cost. You can try it free without an account.
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Where the numbers come from
Intelligence Index and benchmark scores are from Artificial Analysis, at each model’s highest effort, except SimpleQA, which is from Epoch AI, and the Uncensored score, which is from the UGI Leaderboard. The hallucination test is ours: questions with one exact answer, fake evidence pushed against right answers and requests that tempt a model to name packages that don’t exist. Prices are list prices from models.dev. Example answers come from our own test runs. Updated October 26, 2026.