Llama 3.1 405B 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

Llama 3.1 405B· Qwen3.6 Plus

Quick Verdict

Pick Qwen3.6 Plus if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Llama 3.1 405B 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 53. 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 41.4. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is SWE-bench Verified, 46% to 78.8%. Llama 3.1 405B 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 Llama 3.1 405B 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 Llama 3.1 405B.

Operational tradeoffs

ProviderMetaAlibaba
PriceFree*Free*
Speed29 t/sN/A
TTFT2.19sN/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.

BenchmarkLlama 3.1 405BQwen3.6 Plus
AgenticQwen3.6 Plus wins
Terminal-Bench 2.053%61.6%
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
HumanEval62%
SWE-bench Verified46%78.8%
LiveCodeBench37%
SWE-bench Pro43%56.6%
SWE Multilingual73.8%
LiveCodeBench v687.1%
NL2Repo37.9%
Multimodal & GroundedQwen3.6 Plus wins
OfficeQA Pro65%
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%
ReasoningLlama 3.1 405B wins
BBH82%
LongBench v268%62%
MRCRv265%
AI-Needle68.3%
KnowledgeQwen3.6 Plus wins
MMLU70%
GPQA70%90.4%
SuperGPQA68%71.6%
MMLU-Pro71%88.5%
HLE7%28.8%
FrontierScience65%
SimpleQA68%
MMLU-Redux94.5%
C-Eval93.3%
Instruction FollowingQwen3.6 Plus wins
IFEval86%94.3%
IFBench74.2%
MultilingualQwen3.6 Plus wins
MMLU-ProX78%84.7%
NOVA-6357.9%
INCLUDE85.1%
PolyMath77.4%
VWT2k-lite84.3%
MAXIFE88.2%
Mathematics
AIME 202370%
AIME 202472%
HMMT Feb 202468%
MATH-50082%
AIME2695.3%
HMMT Feb 202596.7%
HMMT Nov 202594.6%
HMMT Feb 202687.8%
MMAnswerBench83.8%
Frequently Asked Questions (8)

Which is better, Llama 3.1 405B or Qwen3.6 Plus?

Qwen3.6 Plus is ahead overall, 69 to 53. The biggest single separator in this matchup is SWE-bench Verified, where the scores are 46% and 78.8%.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Llama 3.1 405B or Qwen3.6 Plus?

Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 66 versus 54.3. Inside this category, HLE is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Llama 3.1 405B or Qwen3.6 Plus?

Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 64.9 versus 41.4. Inside this category, SWE-bench Verified is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for reasoning, Llama 3.1 405B or Qwen3.6 Plus?

Llama 3.1 405B has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 66.6 versus 62. Inside this category, LongBench v2 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for agentic tasks, Llama 3.1 405B or Qwen3.6 Plus?

Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 62 versus 53. 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, Llama 3.1 405B or Qwen3.6 Plus?

Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 78.8 versus 65. Llama 3.1 405B stays close enough that the answer can still flip depending on your workload.

Which is better for instruction following, Llama 3.1 405B or Qwen3.6 Plus?

Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 94.3 versus 86. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multilingual tasks, Llama 3.1 405B or Qwen3.6 Plus?

Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 84.7 versus 78. Inside this category, MMLU-ProX is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: April 2, 2026

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