Pairwise benchmark snapshot · Aug 17, 2026noindex (thin pair)
In this head-to-head showdown, Poolside: Laguna S 2.1 (free) is more budget-friendly at $0/1M per 1M output tokens. Review the complete breakdown below to determine which model best fits your performance and budget requirements.
Auto-discovered from OpenRouter (poolside/laguna-s-2.1:free). Preview until a second source matches.
Alibaba open-weight 27B drop dated Aug 14 2026. Dense enough to self-host; not a frontier MoE.
Single model data
No latency data
$0 / 1M output
Relative percentile scores computed across all active models in the benchmark catalog.
Each spoke is a skill. Farther from the center is better (0–100th percentile). Tap any dot to inspect details.
Category wins across reasoning intelligence, generation speed, and token cost.
Preference Elo, Coding proficiency, SWE-bench & LiveBench accuracy
Generation throughput and time to first token responsiveness
Cost per million tokens and max context window length
| Benchmark | Poolside: Laguna S 2.1 (free) | Qwen3.8 27B | Advantage Delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| Preference Elo | — | — | |
| Coding Elo | — | — | |
| LiveBench | — | — | |
| SWE-bench | — | — | |
| GPQA Diamond | — | — | |
| Time to first token | — | — | |
| Output speed | — | 152 tok/s | — |
| Input price | $0.45/1M | Poolside: Laguna S 2.1 (free) (+$0.45/1M) | |
| Output price | $3.2/1M | Poolside: Laguna S 2.1 (free) (+$3.2/1M) | |
| Context window | — |
Need SWE-bench on both sides.
Lower output list price ($0/1M).
Need TTFT on both sides.
Larger window (262k).
Qwen3.8 27B is the side marked multimodal in the catalog.
| Target Workload | Recommended Pick | Evaluation Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Repo / coding agents | insufficient data | Need SWE-bench on both sides. |
| High-volume chat | Poolside: Laguna S 2.1 (free) | Lower output list price ($0/1M). |
| Voice / low-latency UI | insufficient data | Need TTFT on both sides. |
| Long-document RAG | Poolside: Laguna S 2.1 (free) | Larger window (262k). |
| Screenshots / vision | Qwen3.8 27B | Qwen3.8 27B is the side marked multimodal in the catalog. |
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The real PNG is generated at /compare/laguna-s-2-1-free-vs-qwen-3-8-27b/opengraph-image for crawlers.
Verified head-to-head card
