Grok 3 Mini 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

Grok 3 Mini· Qwen3.6 Plus

Quick Verdict

Pick Qwen3.6 Plus if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Grok 3 Mini only becomes the better choice if its workflow or ecosystem matters more than the raw scoreboard.

Qwen3.6 Plus is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 69 to 49. 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 41.5. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is GPQA, 66.2% to 90.4%.

Grok 3 Mini is also the more expensive model on tokens at $0.30 input / $0.50 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 gives you the larger context window at 1M, compared with 128K for Grok 3 Mini.

Operational tradeoffs

ProviderxAIAlibaba
Price$0.30 / $0.50Free*
Speed190 t/sN/A
TTFT0.54sN/A
Context128K1M

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.

BenchmarkGrok 3 MiniQwen3.6 Plus
Agentic
Terminal-Bench 2.061.6%
Claw-Eval58.7%
QwenClawBench57.2%
QwenWebBench1502
TAU3-Bench70.7%
VITA-Bench44.3%
DeepPlanning41.5%
Toolathlon39.8%
MCP Atlas48.2%
MCP-Tasks74.1%
WideResearch74.3%
OSWorld-Verified62.5%
CodingQwen3.6 Plus wins
LiveCodeBench41.5%
SWE-bench Verified78.8%
SWE-bench Pro56.6%
SWE Multilingual73.8%
LiveCodeBench v687.1%
NL2Repo37.9%
Multimodal & Grounded
MMMU86.0%
MMMU-Pro78.8%
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%
Reasoning
AI-Needle68.3%
LongBench v262%
KnowledgeQwen3.6 Plus wins
GPQA66.2%90.4%
MMLU-Pro78.9%88.5%
SimpleQA21.7%
SuperGPQA71.6%
MMLU-Redux94.5%
C-Eval93.3%
HLE28.8%
Instruction Following
IFEval94.3%
IFBench74.2%
Multilingual
MMLU-ProX84.7%
NOVA-6357.9%
INCLUDE85.1%
PolyMath77.4%
VWT2k-lite84.3%
MAXIFE88.2%
Mathematics
AIME 202495.8%
AIME2695.3%
HMMT Feb 202596.7%
HMMT Nov 202594.6%
HMMT Feb 202687.8%
MMAnswerBench83.8%
Frequently Asked Questions (3)

Which is better, Grok 3 Mini or Qwen3.6 Plus?

Qwen3.6 Plus is ahead overall, 69 to 49. The biggest single separator in this matchup is GPQA, where the scores are 66.2% and 90.4%.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Grok 3 Mini or Qwen3.6 Plus?

Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 66 versus 59.8. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Grok 3 Mini or Qwen3.6 Plus?

Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 64.9 versus 41.5. Grok 3 Mini stays close enough that the answer can still flip depending on your workload.

Last updated: April 2, 2026

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