Qwen3.6 Plus vs Z-1

Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.

Agentic
Coding
Multimodal & Grounded
Reasoning
Knowledge
Instruction Following
Multilingual
Mathematics

Qwen3.6 Plus· Z-1

Quick Verdict

Pick Qwen3.6 Plus if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Z-1 only becomes the better choice if 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 44. 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 27.6. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is SWE-bench Verified, 78.8% to 33%.

Qwen3.6 Plus is the reasoning model in the pair, while Z-1 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 Z-1.

Operational tradeoffs

ProviderAlibabaZ
PriceFree*Pricing unavailable
SpeedN/AN/A
TTFTN/AN/A
Context1M128K

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.

BenchmarkQwen3.6 PlusZ-1
AgenticQwen3.6 Plus wins
Terminal-Bench 2.061.6%39%
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%41%
BrowseComp49%
CodingQwen3.6 Plus wins
SWE-bench Verified78.8%33%
SWE-bench Pro56.6%30%
SWE Multilingual73.8%
LiveCodeBench v687.1%
NL2Repo37.9%
HumanEval44%
LiveCodeBench22%
Multimodal & GroundedQwen3.6 Plus wins
MMMU86.0%
MMMU-Pro78.8%46%
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%
OfficeQA Pro56%
ReasoningQwen3.6 Plus wins
AI-Needle68.3%
LongBench v262%56%
MuSR48%
BBH74%
MRCRv257%
KnowledgeQwen3.6 Plus wins
GPQA90.4%
SuperGPQA71.6%49%
MMLU-Pro88.5%64%
MMLU-Redux94.5%
C-Eval93.3%
HLE28.8%6%
MMLU52%
FrontierScience51%
SimpleQA50%
Instruction FollowingQwen3.6 Plus wins
IFEval94.3%80%
IFBench74.2%
MultilingualQwen3.6 Plus wins
MMLU-ProX84.7%72%
NOVA-6357.9%
INCLUDE85.1%
PolyMath77.4%
VWT2k-lite84.3%
MAXIFE88.2%
MGSM74%
Mathematics
AIME2695.3%
HMMT Feb 202596.7%
HMMT Nov 202594.6%
HMMT Feb 202687.8%
MMAnswerBench83.8%
AIME 202352%
AIME 202454%
AIME 202553%
HMMT Feb 202348%
HMMT Feb 202450%
HMMT Feb 202549%
BRUMO 202551%
MATH-50073%
Frequently Asked Questions (8)

Which is better, Qwen3.6 Plus or Z-1?

Qwen3.6 Plus is ahead overall, 69 to 44. The biggest single separator in this matchup is SWE-bench Verified, where the scores are 78.8% and 33%.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Qwen3.6 Plus or Z-1?

Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 66 versus 42.1. Inside this category, MMLU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Qwen3.6 Plus or Z-1?

Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 64.9 versus 27.6. Inside this category, SWE-bench Verified is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for reasoning, Qwen3.6 Plus or Z-1?

Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 62 versus 54.2. Inside this category, LongBench v2 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for agentic tasks, Qwen3.6 Plus or Z-1?

Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 62 versus 42.2. 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, Qwen3.6 Plus or Z-1?

Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 78.8 versus 50.5. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for instruction following, Qwen3.6 Plus or Z-1?

Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 94.3 versus 80. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multilingual tasks, Qwen3.6 Plus or Z-1?

Qwen3.6 Plus has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 84.7 versus 72.7. Inside this category, MMLU-ProX is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: April 2, 2026

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