Head to head
Qwen3-8B vs Llama 3.1 8B
Qwen3-8B from Alibaba Qwen against Llama 3.1 8B from Meta AI — specification, price and every benchmark both makers have published, in one table.
Benchmarks
Qwen3-8B leads
Qwen3-8B wins 1 of the 1 benchmarks both models report, Llama 3.1 8B wins 0, by a wide margin. The average gap across shared tests is 29.2 points.
Price
Llama 3.1 8B is cheaper
On a 3:1 input-to-output mix, Llama 3.1 8B costs $0.035 per million tokens against $0.061 for Qwen3-8B — about 1.7× less. Remember that a reasoning model bills its thinking as output, so cost per answer can diverge much further than cost per token.
What actually differs
- Qwen3-8B is a reasoning model and the other is not, which usually means better maths and multi-step logic in exchange for higher latency and more billed output tokens.
Scorecard
Which is better at what
Maths, coding, reasoning and the rest — one line each, averaged over the benchmarks both models actually report.
| Category | Qwen3-8B | Llama 3.1 8B | Better at this |
|---|---|---|---|
| ReasoningGPQA Diamond | 62.0% | 32.8% | Qwen3-8B+29.2 |
| MathsOnly one model reports this | — | — | Not comparable |
| CodingOnly one model reports this | — | — | Not comparable |
| KnowledgeOnly one model reports this | — | — | Not comparable |
| MultimodalNeither model reports this | — | — | Not comparable |
| Instruction followingOnly one model reports this | — | — | Not comparable |
| Human preferenceNeither model reports this | — | — | Not comparable |
| Categories wonOut of 1 comparable | 1 | 0 | Qwen3-8B |
Each category averages only the benchmarks every model here reports, so no one is credited for a test the other did not run. A category with no shared test is marked Not comparable rather than guessed at.
Side by side
Qwen3-8B and Llama 3.1 8B, row by row
| Attribute | Qwen3-8BAlibaba Qwen | Llama 3.1 8BMeta AI |
|---|---|---|
| Specification | ||
| MakerWho built it | Alibaba Qwen | Meta AI |
| Released | 2025-04 | 2024-07 |
| ParametersTotal, and active per token for a mixture of experts | 8B | 8B |
| Architecture | Dense transformer | Dense transformer |
| Context windowHow much can go in at once | 131,072 tokens | 131,072 tokens |
| Max output | 32,768 tokens | 8,192 tokens |
| Input | Text | Text |
| ReasoningSpends extra tokens thinking before it answers | Yes | No |
| Tool calling | Yes | Yes |
| Licence | Apache 2.0 | Llama 3.1 Community |
| Open weightsCan you download and run it yourself | Yes | Yes |
| Price | ||
| Input priceUSD per million tokens in | $0.035 | $0.03 |
| Output priceUSD per million tokens out | $0.138 | $0.05 |
| Blended 3:1A 3-in-to-1-out million-token mix — a fairer single number than input price alone | $0.061 | $0.035Cheapest |
| Price note | Open weights — this is a representative hosting rate, not a first-party price. Running it yourself costs only hardware. | Open weights — this is a representative hosting rate, not a first-party price. Running it yourself costs only hardware. |
| Published benchmarks | ||
| MMLU-Pro12,000 reasoning-heavy multiple-choice questions across 14 academic subjects, with ten options instead of four. The harder successor to MMLU. | Not reported | |
| GPQA Diamond198 graduate-level physics, chemistry and biology questions written to be Google-proof. PhD holders in the matching field score about 65%. | ||
| AIME 2025The American Invitational Mathematics Examination — 15 problems, integer answers, no partial credit. A standard test of multi-step maths reasoning. | Not reported | |
| HumanEval164 short Python functions written from a docstring. Saturated at the frontier — kept here for continuity with older models. | Not reported | |
| IFEvalVerifiable instructions — word counts, formats, forbidden words — checked by a program rather than a judge model. | Not reported | |
| Links | Hugging Face · Full page | Hugging Face · Full page |
| Row verified | 2026-08 | 2026-08 |
Where these numbers come from
Every score on this page is a published figure, taken from the model's own card, system card, technical report or release post, or from a public leaderboard. CorX Labs did not run these evaluations. Most are self-reported by the lab that built the model, which means they were produced under that lab's own choice of prompt, scaffold and number of attempts — so treat them as a starting point for a shortlist, not as a settled ranking.
A score someone other than the model's maker measured is marked Independent and names its measurer. Those are the stronger numbers on this page — an outside harness has no reason to flatter anyone — and there are not many of them.
Where a figure has not been published, the cell reads Not reported rather than an estimate. Nothing here is inferred, interpolated or guessed. Each model records the month its row was last checked. Full method and caveats.
Questions
Qwen3-8B or Llama 3.1 8B?
Is Qwen3-8B better than Llama 3.1 8B?
Qwen3-8B wins 1 of the 1 benchmarks both models report, Llama 3.1 8B wins 0, by a wide margin. The average gap across shared tests is 29.2 points.
Which is cheaper, Qwen3-8B or Llama 3.1 8B?
On a 3:1 input-to-output mix, Llama 3.1 8B costs $0.035 per million tokens against $0.061 for Qwen3-8B — about 1.7× less. Remember that a reasoning model bills its thinking as output, so cost per answer can diverge much further than cost per token.
What is the difference between Qwen3-8B and Llama 3.1 8B?
Qwen3-8B is a reasoning model and the other is not, which usually means better maths and multi-step logic in exchange for higher latency and more billed output tokens.
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