Head-to-head comparison across 3benchmark categories. Overall scores shown here use BenchLM's provisional ranking lane.
Claude Sonnet 4.5
65
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B
66
Verified leaderboard positions: Claude Sonnet 4.5 unranked · Qwen3.6-35B-A3B #23
Pick Qwen3.6-35B-A3B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude Sonnet 4.5 only becomes the better choice if knowledge is the priority or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.
Agentic
+3.8 difference
Coding
+10.3 difference
Knowledge
+22.9 difference
Claude Sonnet 4.5
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B
$3 / $15
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
200K
262K
Pick Qwen3.6-35B-A3B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude Sonnet 4.5 only becomes the better choice if knowledge is the priority or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B finishes one point ahead on BenchLM's provisional leaderboard, 66 to 65. That is enough to call, but not enough to treat as a blowout. This matchup comes down to a few meaningful edges rather than one model dominating the board.
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is the reasoning model in the pair, while Claude Sonnet 4.5 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. Qwen3.6-35B-A3B gives you the larger context window at 262K, compared with 200K for Claude Sonnet 4.5.
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is ahead on BenchLM's provisional leaderboard, 66 to 65. The biggest single separator in this matchup is SWE-bench Verified, where the scores are 77.2% and 73.4%.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 83.4 versus 60.5. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 77.2 versus 66.9. Inside this category, SWE-bench Verified is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 55.3 versus 51.5. Inside this category, VITA-Bench is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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