Head-to-head comparison across 3benchmark categories. Overall scores shown here use BenchLM's provisional ranking lane.
MiniMax M3
76
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B
66
Verified leaderboard positions: MiniMax M3 #12 · Qwen3.6-35B-A3B #24
Pick MiniMax M3 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Qwen3.6-35B-A3B only becomes the better choice if multimodal & grounded is the priority or you want the stronger reasoning-first profile.
Agentic
+20.4 difference
Coding
+0.1 difference
Multimodal
+11.2 difference
MiniMax M3
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B
$0.3 / $1.2
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
1M
262K
Pick MiniMax M3 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Qwen3.6-35B-A3B only becomes the better choice if multimodal & grounded is the priority or you want the stronger reasoning-first profile.
MiniMax M3 is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 76 to 66. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
MiniMax M3's sharpest advantage is in agentic, where it averages 71.9 against 51.5. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is Terminal-Bench 2.0, 66% to 51.5%. Qwen3.6-35B-A3B does hit back in multimodal & grounded, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is the reasoning model in the pair, while MiniMax M3 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. MiniMax M3 gives you the larger context window at 1M, compared with 262K for Qwen3.6-35B-A3B.
MiniMax M3 is ahead on BenchLM's provisional leaderboard, 76 to 66. The biggest single separator in this matchup is Terminal-Bench 2.0, where the scores are 66% and 51.5%.
MiniMax M3 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 67 versus 66.9. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
MiniMax M3 has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 71.9 versus 51.5. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 76.1 versus 64.9. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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