Compare / Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B vs Qwen3-Coder-Next

Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B vs Qwen3-Coder-Next

Updated November 2026

Verdict

Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 73.4 vs 63.1, although their likely ranges overlap, so the lead is not certain. On the 5 benchmarks both labs report, Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B wins 5 and Qwen3-Coder-Next wins 0. Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B is smaller: it needs about 46.9 GB of memory at 4-bit, against 50.6 GB for Qwen3-Coder-Next. Only Qwen3-Coder-Next has a hosted API on OpenRouter ($0.29 per million tokens); the other has to be self-hosted.

Pick Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B if…

you want the strongest model overall
you mostly write code
you build agents that call tools
you have limited memory (about 46.9 GB at 4-bit)
you need image input

Pick Qwen3-Coder-Next if…

you want a hosted API rather than running it yourself
you need a permissive license (Apache-2.0)
you want the more widely used model (more quantized builds and community support)

Specifications

	Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B	Qwen3-Coder-Next
Small LM Index	73.4 (likely 69–78)	63.1 (likely 54–70)
Lab	NVIDIA · United States	Alibaba (Qwen) · China
Released	2026-10-12	2026-01-30
Parameters	74B (9B active, MoE)	79.7B (3B active, MoE)
Memory at 4-bit	~46.9 GB	~50.6 GB
Context window	262K tokens	262K tokens
Input	text, image	text
Reasoning	Hybrid (thinking on/off)	No thinking
License	OpenMDW-1.1	Apache-2.0
API price / 1M tokens	Self-host only	$0.29 ($0.12 in, $0.80 out)
Hugging Face downloads (30 days)	7.9K	430.1K

Benchmarks

Higher is better. Bold marks the winner where both labs report a score. ≈ marks the index model's estimate for a score that wasn't reported, ✓ an independent measurement and * a score measured by another lab.

Benchmark	Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B	Qwen3-Coder-Next
GPQA Diamond Knowledge	88.8	73.7^✓
Humanity's Last Exam Reasoning	24.7^✓	10.1^✓
SWE-bench Verified Coding	≈ 65	70.6
Terminal-Bench Agentic	53.9	36.2
τ²-Bench Agentic	—	79.5^✓
IFBench Instruction following	—	35.2^✓
AA-LCR Long context	69.7^✓	47.0^✓
SciCode Coding	39.7^✓	36.2^✓

Scores are mostly reported by each lab with its own settings, so small gaps are noise. See the methodology. Open in the interactive comparison to add more models.

Questions

Which is better, Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B or Qwen3-Coder-Next?

Which is cheaper to run?

Only Qwen3-Coder-Next has a hosted API on OpenRouter ($0.29 per million tokens); the other has to be self-hosted. Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B is smaller: it needs about 46.9 GB of memory at 4-bit, against 50.6 GB for Qwen3-Coder-Next.

Which has the longer context window?

Both have a 262K-token context window.

Can I use Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B and Qwen3-Coder-Next commercially?

Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B is released under OpenMDW-1.1 and Qwen3-Coder-Next under Apache-2.0. Apache 2.0 and MIT allow commercial use; other licenses can add conditions, so read the license before shipping a product.