head-to-head

Sakana: Fugu Max vs Qwen: Qwen3.8 27B

Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-10-04.

Sakana: Fugu Max Qwen: Qwen3.8 27B
Vendorsakanaqwen
Quality Score100100
Benchmark Score-55.6
Input Price$2.00/M$0.42/M
Output Price$6.00/M$3.00/M
Context Window1,000,0001,000,000
Max Output128,000131,072
Tool Calling✓✓
Structured Output✓✓
Reasoning Mode✓✓
Vision✓✓
Audio--
Benchmark Scores
ai_index-55.6

The verdict

For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Qwen3.8 27B costs $1.17 and Fugu Max costs $3.50, so Qwen3.8 27B is about 3.0 times cheaper for the same work.

Both read up to 1,000,000 tokens at once, roughly 1,500 pages of text.

Only Qwen3.8 27B offers video input.

Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Qwen3.8 27B on 20 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Completion and others).

Fugu Max was released in September 2026 and Qwen3.8 27B in August 2026.

Pick Qwen3.8 27B if you need lower cost, video input or the stronger all-round task scores.

Costs use current list prices per million tokens; page counts assume about 0.75 words per token and 500 words per page.

Who wins by task?

TaskSakana: Fugu MaxQwen: Qwen3.8 27B
SQL Generation 133 140
Code Review 132 142
Code Completion 118 132
Code Refactoring 136 144
Bug Fixing 136 146
Unit Test Generation 124 130
Code Documentation 130 136
Regex Writing 118 124
CI/CD Pipelines 120 126
Frontend Component Design 122 128
Data Analysis 124 132
CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup 133 135
ETL Scripting 128 135
JSON Extraction 122 131
Bulk Data Labeling 119 129
OCR / Document Parsing 131 133
Table Extraction from PDFs 131 133
Long-Document Summarization 137 146
Short-Form Summarization 114 126
Blog Post Writing 121 128

Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →

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