The closest alternative to Qwen3.5-9B is DeepSeek V3.2 Exp — comparable intelligence (32.1 vs 32.4); for a cheaper option, Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) runs Free/M vs $0.100/M; for more speed, gpt-oss-120b (free) hits 554 t/s; and the best open-weight substitute is MiniMax M3.
DeepSeek V3.2 Exp is the closest alternative to Qwen3.5-9B, with an Intelligence Index of 32.1 (Qwen3.5-9B scores 32.4) at $0.270 per million input tokens.
Yes — Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) costs Free per million input tokens versus $0.100 for Qwen3.5-9B, while staying within ~8 points of its Intelligence Index.
MiniMax M3 is the strongest open-weight alternative to Qwen3.5-9B — downloadable from Hugging Face and self-hostable, scoring 54.7 on intelligence.