Head-to-head comparison across 7 benchmark categories
Kimi K2.5
72
Qwen3.6 Plus
69
Pick Kimi K2.5 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Qwen3.6 Plus only becomes the better choice if multimodal & grounded is the priority or you want the cheaper token bill.
Agentic
+4.4 difference
Coding
+1.8 difference
Reasoning
+4.9 difference
Knowledge
+0.6 difference
Multilingual
+2.2 difference
Multimodal
+4.6 difference
Inst. Following
+0.4 difference
Kimi K2.5
Qwen3.6 Plus
$0.5 / $2.8
$0 / $0
45 t/s
N/A
2.38s
N/A
128K
1M
Pick Kimi K2.5 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Qwen3.6 Plus only becomes the better choice if multimodal & grounded is the priority or you want the cheaper token bill.
Kimi K2.5 has the cleaner overall profile here, landing at 72 versus 69. It is a real lead, but still close enough that category-level strengths matter more than the headline number.
Kimi K2.5's sharpest advantage is in reasoning, where it averages 66.9 against 62. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is QwenWebBench, 1160 to 1502. Qwen3.6 Plus does hit back in multimodal & grounded, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.
Kimi K2.5 is also the more expensive model on tokens at $0.50 input / $2.80 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 Kimi K2.5 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 128K for Kimi K2.5.
Kimi K2.5 is ahead overall, 72 to 69. The biggest single separator in this matchup is QwenWebBench, where the scores are 1160 and 1502.
Kimi K2.5 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 66.6 versus 66. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Kimi K2.5 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 66.7 versus 64.9. Inside this category, NL2Repo is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Kimi K2.5 has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 66.9 versus 62. Inside this category, AI-Needle 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 57.6. Inside this category, QwenWebBench is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 78.8 versus 74.2. Inside this category, RefCOCO (avg) 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 93.9. Inside this category, IFBench is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 84.7 versus 82.5. Inside this category, PolyMath is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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