Claude 4 Sonnet vs Qwen3.6 Plus

Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.

Agentic
Coding
Multimodal & Grounded
Reasoning
Knowledge
Instruction Following
Multilingual
Mathematics

Claude 4 Sonnet· Qwen3.6 Plus

Quick Verdict

Pick Qwen3.6 Plus if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude 4 Sonnet only becomes the better choice if reasoning is the priority or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.

Qwen3.6 Plus is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 69 to 62. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Qwen3.6 Plus's sharpest advantage is in coding, where it averages 64.9 against 49.1. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is GPQA, 73% to 90.4%. Claude 4 Sonnet does hit back in reasoning, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

Qwen3.6 Plus is the reasoning model in the pair, while Claude 4 Sonnet is not. That usually helps on harder chain-of-thought-heavy tests, but it can also mean more latency and more token spend in real use. Qwen3.6 Plus gives you the larger context window at 1M, compared with 200K for Claude 4 Sonnet.

Operational tradeoffs

PricePricing unavailableFree*
Speed40 t/sN/A
TTFT1.33sN/A
Context200K1M

Decision framing

BenchLM keeps the benchmark table and the operator tradeoffs on the same page so a better score does not hide a materially slower, pricier, or smaller-context model.

Runtime metrics show N/A when BenchLM does not have a sourced snapshot for that exact model. The scoring rules and freshness policy are documented on the methodology page.

BenchmarkClaude 4 SonnetQwen3.6 Plus
AgenticQwen3.6 Plus wins
Terminal-Bench 2.056%61.6%
BrowseComp62%
OSWorld-Verified57%62.5%
Claw-Eval58.7%
QwenClawBench57.2%
QwenWebBench1502
TAU3-Bench70.7%
VITA-Bench44.3%
DeepPlanning41.5%
Toolathlon39.8%
MCP Atlas48.2%
MCP-Tasks74.1%
WideResearch74.3%
CodingQwen3.6 Plus wins
HumanEval65%
SWE-bench Verified72.7%78.8%
LiveCodeBench36%
SWE-bench Pro48%56.6%
SWE Multilingual73.8%
LiveCodeBench v687.1%
NL2Repo37.9%
Multimodal & GroundedClaude 4 Sonnet wins
MMMU-Pro81%78.8%
OfficeQA Pro78%
MMMU86.0%
RealWorldQA85.4%
OmniDocBench 1.591.2%
Video-MME (with subtitle)87.8%
Video-MME (w/o subtitle)84.2%
MathVision88.0%
We-Math89.0%
DynaMath88.0%
MStar83.3%
SimpleVQA67.3%
ChatCVQA81.5%
MMLongBench-Doc62.0%
CC-OCR83.4%
AI2D_TEST94.4%
CountBench97.6%
RefCOCO (avg)93.5%
ODINW1351.8%
ERQA65.7%
VideoMMMU84.0%
MLVU (M-Avg)86.7%
ScreenSpot Pro68.2%
ReasoningClaude 4 Sonnet wins
MuSR69%
BBH82%
LongBench v271%62%
MRCRv272%
AI-Needle68.3%
KnowledgeQwen3.6 Plus wins
MMLU86.5%
GPQA73%90.4%
SuperGPQA71%71.6%
MMLU-Pro75%88.5%
HLE12%28.8%
FrontierScience67%
SimpleQA71%
MMLU-Redux94.5%
C-Eval93.3%
Instruction FollowingQwen3.6 Plus wins
IFEval83%94.3%
IFBench74.2%
MultilingualQwen3.6 Plus wins
MGSM84%
MMLU-ProX81%84.7%
NOVA-6357.9%
INCLUDE85.1%
PolyMath77.4%
VWT2k-lite84.3%
MAXIFE88.2%
Mathematics
AIME 202373%
AIME 202475%
AIME 202574%
HMMT Feb 202369%
HMMT Feb 202471%
HMMT Feb 202570%
BRUMO 202572%
MATH-50081%
AIME2695.3%
HMMT Feb 202596.7%
HMMT Nov 202594.6%
HMMT Feb 202687.8%
MMAnswerBench83.8%
Frequently Asked Questions (8)

Which is better, Claude 4 Sonnet or Qwen3.6 Plus?

Qwen3.6 Plus is ahead overall, 69 to 62. The biggest single separator in this matchup is GPQA, where the scores are 73% and 90.4%.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Claude 4 Sonnet or Qwen3.6 Plus?

Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 66 versus 57.8. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Claude 4 Sonnet or Qwen3.6 Plus?

Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 64.9 versus 49.1. Inside this category, SWE-bench Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for reasoning, Claude 4 Sonnet or Qwen3.6 Plus?

Claude 4 Sonnet has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 70.8 versus 62. Inside this category, LongBench v2 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for agentic tasks, Claude 4 Sonnet or Qwen3.6 Plus?

Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 62 versus 57.9. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multimodal and grounded tasks, Claude 4 Sonnet or Qwen3.6 Plus?

Claude 4 Sonnet has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 79.7 versus 78.8. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for instruction following, Claude 4 Sonnet or Qwen3.6 Plus?

Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 94.3 versus 83. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multilingual tasks, Claude 4 Sonnet or Qwen3.6 Plus?

Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 84.7 versus 82.1. Inside this category, MMLU-ProX is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: April 2, 2026

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