Claude Sonnet 4.5 vs Qwen3.6 Plus
Updated October 21, 2026. 66 benchmarks have a result for both. Coding is ranked on the Vibe Coding Index; every other board is shown as published.
Decision reading
Pick Claude Sonnet 4.5 for coding: it scores 59.1 on the Vibe Coding Index against 37.4 for Qwen3.6 Plus.
Pick Qwen3.6 Plus when output tokens cost 7.7x less, or when what matters is LMArena WebDev or AA Coding Index, where it leads.
- Shared results
- 66
- Claude Sonnet 4.5 only
- 26
- Qwen3.6 Plus only
- 17
- Like-for-like categories
- 8 of 9
Shared results can support a head-to-head reading. Results only one model has describe coverage, not superiority.
Which one for your work
Each card is decided by one number both models carry. Where only one has it, the card says so and makes no call.
Coding
Vibe Coding Index, four public coding benchmarks
Claude Sonnet 4.5
Claude Sonnet 4.5 scores 59.1 against 37.4.
2 and 1 benchmarks behind the scores
Intelligence
AA Intelligence Index
Qwen3.6 Plus
Qwen3.6 Plus leads, 27.0 against 20.7.
Same board, both measured
Agentic work
AA Agentic Index
No call
Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 has a AA Agentic Index result, 15.8.
Directional only
Reasoning
GPQA Diamond
Qwen3.6 Plus
Qwen3.6 Plus leads, 87.4% against 81.6%.
Same board, both measured
Math
AIME
Qwen3.6 Plus
Qwen3.6 Plus leads, 94.6% against 88.2%.
Same board, both measured
Knowledge
MMLU Pro
Qwen3.6 Plus
Qwen3.6 Plus leads, 87.7% against 87.4%.
Same board, both measured
Web design
Design Arena: websites
Qwen3.6 Plus
Qwen3.6 Plus leads, 1243 against 1190.
Same board, both measured
Long documents
Listed context window
No call
Both take 1M tokens.
Listed by OpenRouter
Everyday cost
1K input + 500 output tokens
Qwen3.6 Plus
Claude Sonnet 4.5 $0.011, Qwen3.6 Plus $0.0013 per turn.
List prices
Cost per solved task
One SWE-bench Verified task, solved
Claude Sonnet 4.5
Claude Sonnet 4.5 $1.16, Qwen3.6 Plus $1.19.
Published attempt cost and pass rate
At a glance
- Coding index
- Claude Sonnet 4.5 59.1 from 2 benchmarks, Qwen3.6 Plus 37.4 from 1 benchmark.
- Widest category
- Agentic work, 8.0 points apart on average over 1 shared benchmark.
- Widest single gap
- OTIS Mock AIME: Claude Sonnet 4.5 77.8% against Qwen3.6 Plus 93.3%, 15.6 points apart on a 0 to 100 scale.
- Output price
- Claude Sonnet 4.5 $15.00 against Qwen3.6 Plus $1.95 per million output tokens, 7.7x apart.
- Context window
- Both take 1M tokens.
Benchmark by benchmark
First the score: boards each model leads, per category, where both have a result. Then every board, a category to a fold; bars are each result on a 0 to 100 scale, so compare the two in a row, not one row with another.
| Category | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Bars | Qwen3.6 Plus | Ties |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coding | 2 | 7 | ||
| Intelligence | 0 | 2 | ||
| Agentic work | 0 | 1 | ||
| Reasoning | 4 | 4 | ||
| Math | 1 | 4 | ||
| Knowledge | 7 | 5 | ||
| Web design | 1 | 7 | ||
| General | 17 | 4 | ||
| All shared boards | 32 | 34 |
CodingLike-for-likeFour of these boards feed the Vibe Coding Index27
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Qwen3.6 Plus | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 74.8% | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| SWE-bench Multilingual | 67.0% | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| LMArena WebDev | 1394 | 1461 | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| AA Coding Index | 52.1 | 54.5 | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| LiveCodeBench (Vals AI) | 73.0% | 86.0% | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| SWE-bench Verified (Vals AI) | 70.0% | 73.4% | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| Vibe Code Bench (Vals AI) | 22.6% | 25.6% | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| Code migration (Vals AI) | Not measured | 11.1% | Only Qwen3.6 Plus measured |
| ProgramBench (Vals AI) | Not measured | 0.0% | Only Qwen3.6 Plus measured |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Vals AI) | Not measured | 53.2% | Only Qwen3.6 Plus measured |
| Terminal-Bench Hard (Artificial Analysis run) | Not measured | 43.9% | Only Qwen3.6 Plus measured |
| Terminal-Bench | 46.5% | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| GSO-Bench | 14.7% | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| WeirdML | 47.7% | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| Cybench | 60.0% | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| ALE-Bench | Not measured | 670.1 | Only Qwen3.6 Plus measured |
| LMArena Text: coding | 1488 | 1467 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| LMArena Text: software and IT | 1473 | 1462 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| LMArena WebDev: React | 1386 | 1454 | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| LMArena WebDev: HTML | 1399 | 1463 | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| LMArena WebDev: from an image | Not measured | 1472 | Only Qwen3.6 Plus measured |
| Neither model has a result on the other 17 boards here | |||
IntelligenceLike-for-likePublic boards, shown as published, kept out of the index02
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Qwen3.6 Plus | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| AA Intelligence Index | 20.7 | 27.0 | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 146.7 | 147.3 | Qwen3.6 Plus |
Agentic workLike-for-likePublic boards, shown as published, kept out of the index01
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Qwen3.6 Plus | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| AA Agentic Index | 15.8 | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| Design Arena: agents building web apps | 1060 | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| Design Arena: agents building full-stack apps | 1050 | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| Design Arena: agents building mobile apps | 1137 | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| Finance Agent (Vals AI) | Not measured | 40.9% | Only Qwen3.6 Plus measured |
| Tax Agent Bench (Vals AI) | Not measured | 7.7% | Only Qwen3.6 Plus measured |
| Legal Research Bench (Vals AI) | Not measured | 14.9% | Only Qwen3.6 Plus measured |
| Excel Modeling Benchmark (Vals AI) | Not measured | 32.9% | Only Qwen3.6 Plus measured |
| τ²-Bench Telecom | Not measured | 97.7% | Only Qwen3.6 Plus measured |
| METR time horizons | 67.4% | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| Remote Labor Index | 2.1% | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| GDPval | 42.5% | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| DeepResearch Bench | 52.6% | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| OSWorld | 62.9% | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| Vending-Bench 2 | $3,839 | $5,115 | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| Neither model has a result on the other 24 boards here | |||
ReasoningLike-for-likePublic boards, shown as published, kept out of the index44
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Qwen3.6 Plus | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 81.6% | 87.4% | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| MMMU Pro (Vals AI) | 79.3% | 84.2% | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| GPQA Diamond (Artificial Analysis run) | Not measured | 88.2% | Only Qwen3.6 Plus measured |
| Humanity's Last Exam (Artificial Analysis run) | Not measured | 27.8% | Only Qwen3.6 Plus measured |
| GPQA Diamond (Epoch AI run) | 82.3% | 88.4% | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| ARC-AGI | 63.7% | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 13.6% | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| SimpleBench | 54.3% | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| Chess puzzles | 10.0% | 14.0% | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| Mystery game puzzles | 17.0% | 12.0% | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| EBR-bench | 2.4% | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| VPCT | 39.8% | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| LMArena Text: hard prompts | 1462 | 1448 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| LMArena Text: expert | 1483 | 1454 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| LMArena Text: hard prompts in English | 1471 | 1455 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| Neither model has a result on the other 6 boards here | |||
MathLike-for-likePublic boards, shown as published, kept out of the index14
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Qwen3.6 Plus | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| AIME | 88.2% | 94.6% | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| MGSM (Vals AI) | 94.3% | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| OTIS Mock AIME | 77.8% | 93.3% | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| FrontierMath, tiers 1 to 3 | 23.9% | 38.2% | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| FrontierMath, tier 4 | 2.4% | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| ProofBench | 19.0% | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| MATH level 5 | 97.7% | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| LMArena Text: math | 1449 | 1449 | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| LMArena Text: mathematical work | 1462 | 1448 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| Neither model has a result on the other 4 boards here | |||
KnowledgeLike-for-likePublic boards, shown as published, kept out of the index75
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Qwen3.6 Plus | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| MMLU Pro | 87.4% | 87.7% | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| LegalBench (Vals AI) | 84.1% | 84.2% | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| CaseLaw (Vals AI) | 62.2% | 51.5% | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| CorpFin (Vals AI) | 62.0% | 61.9% | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| TaxEval (Vals AI) | 73.3% | 74.7% | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| MortgageTax (Vals AI) | 64.0% | 68.0% | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| MedQA (Vals AI) | 94.7% | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| MedCode (Vals AI) | 44.1% | 36.9% | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| SimpleQA Verified | 30.7% | 44.1% | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| LMArena Text: science | 1448 | 1439 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| LMArena Text: medicine and healthcare | 1444 | 1442 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| LMArena Text: legal and government | 1451 | 1437 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| LMArena Text: business and finance | 1440 | 1430 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| Neither model has a result on the other 4 boards here | |||
Web designLike-for-likePublic boards, shown as published, kept out of the index17
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Qwen3.6 Plus | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| Design Arena: websites | 1190 | 1243 | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| Design Arena: UI components | 1173 | 1233 | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| Design Arena: game dev | 1166 | 1211 | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| Design Arena: data viz | 1167 | 1228 | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| Design Arena: 3D | 1158 | 1202 | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| Design Arena: all code categories | 1183 | 1236 | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| Design Arena: SVG | 1114 | 1160 | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| Design Arena: ASCII art | 1204 | 1115 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| Neither model has a result on the other 1 board here | |||
GeneralLike-for-likePublic boards, shown as published, kept out of the index174
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Qwen3.6 Plus | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| SAGE (Vals AI) | 36.1% | 44.9% | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| MedScribe (Vals AI) | 84.5% | 77.0% | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| Vals Multimodal Index | Not measured | 51.5% | Only Qwen3.6 Plus measured |
| IFBench | Not measured | 75.2% | Only Qwen3.6 Plus measured |
| Long context reasoning (AA-LCR) | Not measured | 78.3% | Only Qwen3.6 Plus measured |
| DTBench | 83.2% | 81.9% | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| LMCA | 38.8% | 33.1% | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| CL-bench | Not measured | 20.3% | Only Qwen3.6 Plus measured |
| LMArena Text | 1438 | 1436 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| LMArena Text: instruction following | 1459 | 1424 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| LMArena Text: creative writing | 1442 | 1404 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| LMArena Text: English | 1450 | 1445 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| LMArena Text: non-English | 1425 | 1424 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| LMArena Text: Chinese | 1460 | 1477 | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| LMArena Text: German | 1427 | 1451 | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| LMArena Text: Japanese | 1390 | 1390 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| LMArena Text: Korean | 1402 | 1379 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| LMArena Text: French | 1459 | 1455 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| LMArena Text: Spanish | 1458 | 1432 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| LMArena Text: Russian | 1437 | 1434 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| LMArena Text: Polish | 1423 | 1433 | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| LMArena Text: multi-turn | 1465 | 1438 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| LMArena Text: longer queries | 1475 | 1439 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| LMArena Text: writing and language | 1442 | 1418 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| LMArena Text: entertainment and media | 1428 | 1402 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
| LMArena Document | 1450 | Not measured | Only Claude Sonnet 4.5 measured |
| Neither model has a result on the other 20 boards here | |||
Image generationNot comparablePublic boards, shown as published, kept out of the index0 boards, none shared
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Qwen3.6 Plus | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| Neither model has a result on 5 boards here | |||
What each workload costs
Three fixed token mixes at each model's listed price, so per-token rates become a bill.
Chat turn
1K input + 500 output tokens
Qwen3.6 Plus costs less
Repository review
50K input + 3K output tokens
Qwen3.6 Plus costs less
Agent loop
200K input + 10K output tokens
Qwen3.6 Plus costs less
Listed OpenRouter rates, without cache or batch discounts. A workload that does not fit a model's context window would need splitting.
Specification differences
The leading value in a row is marked; a row with a missing value names no leader. Our two rows are marked in red.
| Specification | Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Qwen3.6 Plus |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Anthropic | Qwen |
| Weights | No public weights listed | No public weights listed |
| Released | September 29, 2025 | April 2, 2026 |
| Context window | 1M | 1M |
| Input $/Mtok | $3.00 | $0.325 |
| Output $/Mtok | $15.00 | $1.95 |
| Coding index | 59.1 | 37.4 |
| Independent measurements behind it | 2 | 1 |
| Cost per solved task | $1.16 | $1.19 |
| Source | OpenRouter listing | OpenRouter listing |
Questions
Is Claude Sonnet 4.5 better than Qwen3.6 Plus for coding?
Pick Claude Sonnet 4.5 for coding: it scores 59.1 on the Vibe Coding Index against 37.4 for Qwen3.6 Plus. Pick Qwen3.6 Plus when output tokens cost 7.7x less, or when what matters is LMArena WebDev or AA Coding Index, where it leads.
Which is cheaper, Claude Sonnet 4.5 or Qwen3.6 Plus?
Claude Sonnet 4.5 costs $3.00 per million input tokens and $15.00 per million output tokens; Qwen3.6 Plus costs $0.325 and $1.95. Per solved SWE-bench Verified task, Claude Sonnet 4.5 costs $1.16 and Qwen3.6 Plus $1.19.
Which has the bigger context window, Claude Sonnet 4.5 or Qwen3.6 Plus?
Neither: both take 1M tokens.
How many benchmarks is the Claude Sonnet 4.5 vs Qwen3.6 Plus comparison based on?
66 benchmarks have a result for both models as of October 21, 2026. Claude Sonnet 4.5's coding index rests on 2 independent benchmarks and Qwen3.6 Plus's on 1. Where only one model has a result, the page says so instead of naming a winner.