Muse Spark 1.3 or Qwen3.5 Flash: which to choose?

What are we comparing?

This comparison pits two budget models, built for high volumes at a low price against each other: Muse Spark 1.3 and Qwen3.5 Flash, one from Meta, the other from Alibaba Cloud (Qwen). The first dates from September 2, 2026, the second from February 23, 2026.

All figures below come from public sources checked on October 22, 2026: models.dev and OpenRouter for prices and capabilities, Epoch AI for scores.

What the benchmarks say

On our capability index, Muse Spark 1.3 scores 82.7 out of 100 and Qwen3.5 Flash 62.6. Muse Spark 1.3 leads by 20.1 points.

On the 2 benchmarks reported for both, Muse Spark 1.3 wins 2 times and Qwen3.5 Flash 0:

• OTIS Mock AIME (competition mathematics problems): Muse Spark 1.3 99.2%, Qwen3.5 Flash 84.4%
• FrontierMath (very hard research-level mathematics): Muse Spark 1.3 74.4%, Qwen3.5 Flash 18.2%

Pricing

Muse Spark 1.3 costs $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.20 per million output tokens; Qwen3.5 Flash costs $0.10 and $0.40.

For a typical agent task (read 20,000 tokens, write 2,000), expect $0.002 with Muse Spark 1.3 versus $0.003 with Qwen3.5 Flash. Muse Spark 1.3 is 1.2 times cheaper, a gap that adds up quickly over 1,000 tasks: $0.40 difference.

Run the numbers with your own volumes in the agent cost calculator.

Features and limits

Muse Spark 1.3 reads more in one go: 1,048,576 tokens of context (roughly 1,573 pages), versus 1,000,000 for Qwen3.5 Flash.

Reasoning mode: Muse Spark 1.3 yes, Qwen3.5 Flash yes. Tool calling: Muse Spark 1.3 yes, Qwen3.5 Flash yes. Image input: Muse Spark 1.3 yes, Qwen3.5 Flash yes.

Neither publishes its weights: both are used through an API.

In short

Our reading of the data:

• Choose Muse Spark 1.3 for a higher capability index, a lower cost and a more recent release.

This verdict relies on public figures; it does not replace a trial on your own tasks.