Inkling Small vs Qwen3.8 27B vs Qwen3.8 Max

It is close. Our weighted score puts them within a point (Inkling Small 70/100, Qwen3.8 Max 69/100, Qwen3.8 27B 67/100), so choose by what matters most for your work: Qwen3.8 Max for raw capability, Inkling Small on price and Inkling Small for long inputs. The score weighs capability 50%, price 25%, inputs & features 15%, context window 10%.

Inkling Small is cheaper at $0.50 input / $1.20 output per million tokens (median across 11 API providers). Qwen3.8 27B costs $0.40 input / $2.50 output per million tokens (median across 39 API providers); Qwen3.8 Max costs $2.00 input / $6.00 output per million tokens (official Alibaba API price). At a typical mix of three input tokens to one output token, that is $0.675 per million tokens for Inkling Small versus $0.925 for Qwen3.8 27B (1.4× as much) and $3.00 for Qwen3.8 Max (4.4× as much).

Qwen3.8 Max scores higher on the Capabilities Index (ECI): Qwen3.8 Max 156.6 (#20 of 148), Inkling Small 150.2 (#47 of 148) and Qwen3.8 27B 149.4 (#53 of 148). Their confidence ranges do not overlap (154.5–158.8 vs 147.5–152.1), so the gap is a real one.

There are no published SWE-bench Verified results for Inkling Small, Qwen3.8 27B and Qwen3.8 Max yet, so there is no like-for-like coding score. On overall capability, Qwen3.8 Max leads, which tends to carry over to coding, but test on your own codebase. All three support tool calling for agent workflows.

Inkling Small has the largest context window at 1,048,576 tokens, against 1,000,000 for Qwen3.8 Max and 262,144 for Qwen3.8 27B. Maximum output per response: Inkling Small up to 1,048,576, Qwen3.8 27B up to 32,768, Qwen3.8 Max up to 131,072 tokens.

Inkling Small accepts text, images and audio; Qwen3.8 27B accepts text, images and video; Qwen3.8 Max accepts text, images, PDFs and video. Qwen3.8 Max handles the widest range of inputs.

Inkling Small and Qwen3.8 27B publishes its weights (Apache-2.0) and can be self-hosted; Qwen3.8 Max is proprietary.

Qwen3.8 27B is the newest, released Aug 14, 2026. Qwen3.8 Max came out Aug 3, 2026; Inkling Small came out Jul 30, 2026.

Each model gets a 0–100 score on capability (50%, independent benchmark results); price (25%, blended price per million tokens (3 input : 1 output), log scale); inputs & features (15%, image, PDF, audio and video input, tool calling, structured output and reasoning); context window (10%, maximum tokens per request, log scale). Dimensions missing for any model are dropped and the remaining weights rescaled, so every model is judged on the same evidence. Specs and prices come from public model listings and the labs’ own API pages; capability scores come from independent benchmark runs. Data updated Oct 4, 2026.