Head-to-head comparison across 7 benchmark categories
Claude Sonnet 4.5
68
Qwen3.6 Plus
69
Pick Qwen3.6 Plus if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude Sonnet 4.5 only becomes the better choice if multimodal & grounded is the priority or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.
Agentic
+2.0 difference
Coding
+4.1 difference
Reasoning
+1.7 difference
Knowledge
+5.2 difference
Multilingual
+3.7 difference
Multimodal
+16.2 difference
Inst. Following
+4.3 difference
Claude Sonnet 4.5
Qwen3.6 Plus
$3 / $15
$0 / $0
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
200K
1M
Pick Qwen3.6 Plus if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude Sonnet 4.5 only becomes the better choice if multimodal & grounded is the priority or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.
Qwen3.6 Plus finishes one point ahead overall, 69 to 68. 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 Plus's sharpest advantage is in instruction following, where it averages 94.3 against 90. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is VITA-Bench, 17.0% to 44.3%. Claude Sonnet 4.5 does hit back in multimodal & grounded, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 is also the more expensive model on tokens at $3.00 input / $15.00 output per 1M tokens, versus $0.00 input / $0.00 output per 1M tokens for Qwen3.6 Plus. That is roughly Infinityx on output cost alone. Qwen3.6 Plus 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 Plus gives you the larger context window at 1M, compared with 200K for Claude Sonnet 4.5.
Qwen3.6 Plus is ahead overall, 69 to 68. The biggest single separator in this matchup is VITA-Bench, where the scores are 17.0% and 44.3%.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 71.2 versus 66. Inside this category, SuperGPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 64.9 versus 60.8. Inside this category, SWE-bench Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 62 versus 60.3. Inside this category, LongBench v2 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 62 versus 60. Inside this category, VITA-Bench is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 95 versus 78.8. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 94.3 versus 90. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 88.4 versus 84.7. Inside this category, MMLU-ProX is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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