Roboflow

Qwen3.5 35B A3B vs SAM 3

Compare Qwen3.5 35B A3B and SAM 3 side-by-side.

Compare Qwen3.5 35B A3B vs SAM 3 live

Run the same image across every model that supports a task and compare their outputs side-by-side.

These models don't share enough common tasks for a side-by-side demo. See the comparison table below for their capabilities.

Models in this comparison

Meta

Qwen3.5 35B A3B vs SAM 3 Comparison Table

Evals updated October 13, 2026Pricing updated October 16, 2026

PropertyQwen3.5 35B A3BSAM 3
OrganizationQwenMeta
Categoryopenopen
Modalitymultimodalmultimodal
Release DateFeb 2026Nov 2025
Context Window262K—
Parameters35BUnknown
LicenseApache 2.0Custom
Commercial usefree for commercial useSee license terms
Pricing per 1M tokens
Input $/1M$0.150No published price
Output $/1M$1.00No published price
Vision Tasks
Object DetectionSupportedDemo
CaptioningDemoNot listed
Chart Question AnsweringSupportedNot listed
ClassificationSupportedNot listed
Document Question AnsweringSupportedNot listed
Image TaggingSupportedNot listed
Instance SegmentationNot listedSupported
Multi-Label ClassificationSupportedNot listed
OCRDemoNot listed
Open Vocabulary Object DetectionNot listedSupported
Promptable Concept SegmentationNot listedDemo
Video Object TrackingNot listedSupported
Vision LanguageSupportedNot listed
Visual Question AnsweringDemoNot listed
Zero Shot SegmentationNot listedSupported
Model Features
Foundation VisionSupportedSupported
Multimodal VisionSupportedSupported
LLMs with Vision CapabilitiesSupportedNot listed
Zero-shot DetectionNot listedSupported
Vision Evalsground-truth scores across 5 vision tasks
Overall
62.5%
4/5 tasks
Not evaluated
Quantizationsself-hosted
FP859.8%GPTQ-INT462.5%hardware →
Avg cost / sample$0.0016–
Avg speed / sample31.88s–
By task
Object Detection
52.9%
±3.2, Mean of 3 runs, range 49.5 to 55.9
$0
–
Counting
62.6%
±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 60.8 to 64.9
$0
–
Identification
80.2%
±1.6, Mean of 3 runs, range 78.1 to 81.3
$0
–
OCR––
by category
Reasoning
54.1%
±0.3, Mean of 3 runs, range 53.6 to 54.3
$0
–

Qwen3.5 35B A3B vs SAM 3: Overview

Qwen3.5 35B A3B

The Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is a native vision-language model developed by Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen team, released on February 24, 2026, as a high-efficiency entry in the Qwen 3.5 family. It utilizes a sophisticated hybrid architecture that integrates Gated Delta Networks with a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) system. While the model houses 35 billion total parameters, its routing mechanism activates only 8 routed experts and 1 shared expert per token, totaling approximately 3 billion active parameters. This design achieves cross-generational parity with the previous flagship Qwen3-235B dense model, delivering comparable reasoning and multimodal intelligence with significantly reduced inference latency and compute requirements. Available under the Apache 2.0 license, it is released in both base and instruction-tuned variants for seamless integration with open-source stacks like vLLM and Hugging Face Transformers.

Designed for the emerging era of agentic AI, the model utilizes a unified multimodal foundation built through early-fusion training. This approach allows it to outperform the prior Qwen3-VL series in spatial grounding, document analysis, and UI/GUI interaction. It features a native context window of 262,144 tokens, which is extensible up to 1,010,000 tokensvia RoPE scaling, and provides global support for 201 languages and dialects. This combination of a compact active parameter count and frontier-level visual comprehension makes it a versatile tool for developers requiring a balance of high-throughput speed and sophisticated visual reasoning for long-context workflows.

SAM 3

Released on November 19th, 2025, Segment Anything 3 (SAM 3) is a zero-shot image segmentation model that “detects, segments, and tracks objects in images and videos based on concept prompts.” This model was developed by Meta as the third model in the Segment Anything series.

Unlike its previous SAM models (Segment Anything and Segment Anything 2), you can provide SAM 3 with the prompt “shipping container” and it will generate precise segmentation masks for all shipping containers in an image. SAM 3 generates segmentation masks that correspond to the location of the objects found with a text prompt.

Frequently Asked Questions

SAM 3 has not yet been evaluated on Roboflow's current Vision Evals, so this comparison shows specs, licensing, and pricing rather than benchmark scores.

Qwen3.5 35B A3B is released under Apache 2.0, while SAM 3 uses Custom. In practice: Qwen3.5 35B A3B — free for commercial use. Licensing often matters more than raw accuracy for commercial deployments, so check the terms against how you plan to ship.