Head-to-head comparison across 7benchmark categories. Overall scores shown here use BenchLM's provisional ranking lane.
Qwen3.5 397B
64
Qwen3.6 Plus
73
Verified leaderboard positions: Qwen3.5 397B #15 · Qwen3.6 Plus #10
Pick Qwen3.6 Plus if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Qwen3.5 397B only becomes the better choice if instruction following is the priority or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.
Agentic
+5.4 difference
Coding
+4.5 difference
Reasoning
+1.2 difference
Knowledge
+0.8 difference
Multilingual
Multimodal
Inst. Following
+4.8 difference
Qwen3.5 397B
Qwen3.6 Plus
$0.6 / $3.6
$null / $null
96 t/s
N/A
2.44s
N/A
128K
1M
Pick Qwen3.6 Plus if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Qwen3.5 397B only becomes the better choice if instruction following 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 provisional aggregate, 73 to 64. 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 agentic, where it averages 61.6 against 56.2. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is Terminal-Bench 2.0, 52.5% to 61.6%. Qwen3.5 397B does hit back in instruction following, 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 Qwen3.5 397B 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 Qwen3.5 397B.
Qwen3.6 Plus is ahead on BenchLM's provisional leaderboard, 73 to 64. The biggest single separator in this matchup is Terminal-Bench 2.0, where the scores are 52.5% and 61.6%.
Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 66 versus 65.2. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 64.8 versus 60.3. Inside this category, SWE-bench Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Qwen3.5 397B has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 63.2 versus 62. 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 61.6 versus 56.2. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Qwen3.5 397B and Qwen3.6 Plus are effectively tied for multimodal and grounded tasks here, both landing at 79.6 on average.
Qwen3.5 397B has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 92.6 versus 87.8. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Qwen3.5 397B and Qwen3.6 Plus are effectively tied for multilingual tasks here, both landing at 84.7 on average.
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