Side-by-side comparison of pricing, context window, benchmarks, capabilities, and license. Data sourced from the Interestana AI Index, kept current as developers update their models.
Model A — Microsoft Research
Phi-4 is Microsoft Research’s small-model masterpiece: 14 billion parameters yet competitive with much larger models on math and reasoning, trained largely on synthetic data.
Model B — Alibaba
Qwen3 235B is Alibaba’s flagship open-weight model. The MoE architecture and Apache 2.0 license make it a popular base for fine-tuning in the open-source community.
| Property | Phi-4 | Qwen3 235B |
|---|---|---|
| Released | Dec 12, 2024 | Apr 29, 2025 |
| Developer | Microsoft Research | Alibaba |
| Type | llm | llm |
| License | open-weight | open-weight |
| Context window | 16,000 | 128,000 |
| Parameters | 14B | 235B MoE (22B active) |
| Input $/M tokens | — | — |
| Output $/M tokens | — | — |
Bold green values indicate the winner on that dimension where comparison is meaningful (lower price wins; bigger context wins; more open license wins; newer date wins).
Programmatic access available at /api/ai/compare?a=phi-4&b=qwen-3-235b. CORS is open. Citation guidance: /about/editorial-process.