MiniMax-M3 vs Qwen3.7 Plus vs Qwen3.8 27B

It is close. Our weighted score puts them within a point (Qwen3.7 Plus 70/100, MiniMax-M3 69/100, Qwen3.8 27B 67/100), so choose by what matters most for your work: Qwen3.8 27B for raw capability, MiniMax-M3 on price and MiniMax-M3 for long inputs. The score weighs capability 50%, price 25%, inputs & features 15%, context window 10%.

MiniMax-M3 is cheaper at $0.30 input / $1.20 output per million tokens (official MiniMax (minimax.io) API price). Qwen3.7 Plus costs $0.40 input / $1.60 output per million tokens (official Alibaba API price); Qwen3.8 27B costs $0.40 input / $2.50 output per million tokens (median across 39 API providers). At a typical mix of three input tokens to one output token, that is $0.525 per million tokens for MiniMax-M3 versus $0.70 for Qwen3.7 Plus (1.3× as much) and $0.925 for Qwen3.8 27B (1.8× as much).

Qwen3.8 27B scores higher on the Capabilities Index (ECI): Qwen3.8 27B 149.4 (#53 of 148), Qwen3.7 Plus 147.4 (#61 of 148) and MiniMax-M3 147.0 (#62 of 148). The confidence ranges of the top two overlap (147.5–151.6 vs 145.7–148.9), so treat the gap as small.

There are no published SWE-bench Verified results for MiniMax-M3, Qwen3.7 Plus and Qwen3.8 27B yet, so there is no like-for-like coding score. On overall capability, Qwen3.8 27B leads, which tends to carry over to coding, but test on your own codebase. All three support tool calling for agent workflows.

MiniMax-M3 has the largest context window at 1,048,576 tokens, against 1,000,000 for Qwen3.7 Plus and 262,144 for Qwen3.8 27B. Maximum output per response: MiniMax-M3 up to 512,000, Qwen3.7 Plus up to 64,000, Qwen3.8 27B up to 32,768 tokens.

MiniMax-M3 accepts text, images and video; Qwen3.7 Plus accepts text, images and video; Qwen3.8 27B accepts text, images and video. They handle the same number of input types.

MiniMax-M3 and Qwen3.8 27B publishes its weights and can be self-hosted; Qwen3.7 Plus is proprietary.

Qwen3.8 27B is the newest, released Aug 14, 2026. Qwen3.7 Plus came out Jun 2, 2026; MiniMax-M3 came out Jun 1, 2026. Knowledge cutoff: Qwen3.7 Plus Apr 2025.

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.