Compare/Qwen3 VL 8B (Reasoning) vs GPT-5 mini (minimal)

Qwen3 VL 8B (Reasoning)vsGPT-5 mini (minimal)

Side-by-side comparison of pricing, 12 benchmarks, and generation speed.

Alibaba

Qwen3 VL 8B (Reasoning)

Input
$0.18/M
Output
$2.1/M
Speed
135 tok/s
TTFT
1.01s
OpenAI

GPT-5 mini (minimal)

Input
$0.25/M
Output
$2/M
Speed
98 tok/s
TTFT
0.86s

Winner by Category

Cheaper
Qwen3 VL 8B (Reasoning)
Faster (tok/s)
Qwen3 VL 8B (Reasoning)
Lower Latency
GPT-5 mini (minimal)
Benchmarks (0-11)
GPT-5 mini (minimal)

Pricing Comparison

MetricQwen3 VL 8B (Reasoning)GPT-5 mini (minimal)
Input ($/M tokens)$0.18$0.25
Output ($/M tokens)$2.1$2
Cost for 1M input + 100K output tokens:
Qwen3 VL 8B (Reasoning)$0.39
GPT-5 mini (minimal)$0.45

Speed Comparison

Output Speed (tokens/s) — higher is better
Qwen3 VL 8B (Reasoning)
135 tok/s
GPT-5 mini (minimal)
98 tok/s
Time to First Token (seconds) — lower is better
Qwen3 VL 8B (Reasoning)
1.01s
GPT-5 mini (minimal)
0.86s

Benchmark Comparison

Data from Artificial Analysis API — 12 benchmarks

Intelligence Index
16.720.7
Coding Index
9.821.9
Math Index
30.746.7
GPQA Diamond
57.9%68.7%
MMLU-Pro
74.9%77.5%
LiveCodeBench
35.3%54.5%
AIME 2025
30.7%46.7%
MATH-500
Humanity's Last Exam
3.3%5.0%
SciCode
21.9%36.9%
IFBench
39.9%45.6%
TerminalBench
3.8%14.4%
Qwen3 VL 8B (Reasoning)0 wins
11 winsGPT-5 mini (minimal)

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is cheaper, Qwen3 VL 8B (Reasoning) or GPT-5 mini (minimal)?

Qwen3 VL 8B (Reasoning) is cheaper overall. Its blended price (3:1 input/output ratio) is $0.66/M tokens vs $0.69/M for GPT-5 mini (minimal).

Which model performs better on benchmarks?

GPT-5 mini (minimal) wins 11 out of 12 benchmarks compared to 0 for Qwen3 VL 8B (Reasoning). See the detailed benchmark chart above for per-category results.

Which is faster for real-time applications?

Qwen3 VL 8B (Reasoning) generates tokens faster at 135 tok/s vs 98 tok/s. However, GPT-5 mini (minimal) has lower time-to-first-token (0.86s vs 1.01s).

When should I use Qwen3 VL 8B (Reasoning) vs GPT-5 mini (minimal)?

Choose based on your priorities: Qwen3 VL 8B (Reasoning) for lower cost, GPT-5 mini (minimal) for stronger benchmark performance, and Qwen3 VL 8B (Reasoning) for faster generation. For latency-sensitive apps, check the TTFT comparison above.