Model comparison
Claude Sonnet 4.5 vs Qwen3.6 27B
Claude Sonnet 4.5 is the stronger model overall, scoring 44.1 to 42.2 on the Noometry Index. Qwen3.6 27B costs 4.4× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Sonnet 4.5's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Last verified . 10 shared benchmarks.
Alibaba (Qwen)Summary
- They share 10 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Sonnet 4.5 scores higher in 3 categories and Qwen3.6 27B in 2 categories; 5 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in math, where Qwen3.6 27B leads 48.5 to 32.3.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025: 77.8% for Claude Sonnet 4.5 and 91.1% for Qwen3.6 27B.
- Qwen3.6 27B is cheaper at $0.60 / $3.60 per million input/output tokens, against $3 / $15 for Claude Sonnet 4.5.
- Qwen3.6 27B accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 200K.
- Qwen3.6 27B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Qwen3.6 27B | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Alibaba (Qwen) |
| Noometry Index | 44.1 | 42.2 |
| Released | 2025-09-29 | 2026-04-22 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |
| Context window | 200K | 262K |
| Max output | 64K | 66K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $3 | $0.60 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $15 | $3.60 |
| Results tracked | 73 | 11 |
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Category by category
Coding Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads
Claude Sonnet 4.5: 47.3 (#61), Qwen3.6 27B: 39.1 (#163)
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| SciCode | 44.7% | 37.3% |
| SWE-bench Verified | 71.3% | — |
| SWE-bench Verified (bash only) | 71.4% | — |
| LMArena WebDev | 1393 | — |
| SWE-bench Multilingual | 67% | — |
| GSO | 14.7% | — |
| WeirdML | 47.7% | — |
| LMArena Coding | 1489 | — |
| ALE-Bench | 796.15 | — |
| AlgoTune | 1.52 | — |
Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable
Claude Sonnet 4.5: 38.3 (#32), Qwen3.6 27B: —
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal-Bench | 46.5% | — |
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | 73.2% | — |
| GDPval | 42.5% | — |
| Remote Labor Index | 2.1% | — |
| τ²-bench Airline | 72% | — |
| τ²-bench Banking | 25.3% | — |
| τ²-bench Retail | 72.4% | — |
| τ²-bench Telecom | 84.9% | — |
| Cybench | 60% | — |
| DeepResearch Bench | 52.6% | — |
| OSWorld | 62.9% | — |
| LMArena Search | 1159 | — |
| METR Time Horizons | 67.4% | — |
| Vending-Bench 2 | 3,839 | — |
Reasoning Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads
Claude Sonnet 4.5: 26.9 (#125), Qwen3.6 27B: 25.0 (#153)
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| CritPt | 1.1% | 0.9% |
| Chess Puzzles | 12% | 22% |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | 17% | 7% |
| DTBench | 83.2% | 78.1% |
| LMCA | 38.8% | 34.5% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 146.84 | 146.5 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 13.6% | — |
| SimpleBench | 54.3% | — |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 57.9% | — |
| NYT Connections (extended) | 37.3% | — |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 63.7% | — |
| EnigmaEval | 6% | — |
| EBR-Bench | 2.4% | — |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1462 | — |
| ForecastBench | 61.9 | — |
Math Qwen3.6 27B leads
Claude Sonnet 4.5: 32.3 (#216), Qwen3.6 27B: 48.5 (#62)
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | 23.9% | 35.1% |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 77.8% | 91.1% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | 2.4% | — |
| ProofBench | 19% | — |
| Omni-MATH | 55.3% | — |
| LMArena Math | 1449 | — |
| MATH Level 5 | 97.7% | — |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 15.2% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | 4.2% | — |
Knowledge Qwen3.6 27B leads
Claude Sonnet 4.5: 48.4 (#76), Qwen3.6 27B: 52.4 (#63)
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 82.3% | 85.9% |
| Humanity's Last Exam | 13.7% | — |
| SimpleQA Verified | 30.7% | — |
| MMLU-Pro | 86.9% | — |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 12% | — |
| GPQA (HELM) | 68.6% | — |
| LMArena Expert | 1482 | — |
Multimodal Not comparable
Claude Sonnet 4.5: 34.8 (#89), Qwen3.6 27B: —
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| VPCT | 39.8% | — |
| LMArena Document | 1450 | — |
Multilingual Not comparable
Claude Sonnet 4.5: 53.4 (#69), Qwen3.6 27B: —
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1425 | — |
| LMArena Chinese | 1459 | — |
| LMArena French | 1458 | — |
| LMArena German | 1427 | — |
| LMArena Japanese | 1390 | — |
| LMArena Korean | 1403 | — |
| LMArena Russian | 1437 | — |
| LMArena Spanish | 1457 | — |
Instruction Following Not comparable
Claude Sonnet 4.5: 75.0 (#78), Qwen3.6 27B: —
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| IFEval | 85% | — |
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1459 | — |
Long Context Not comparable
Claude Sonnet 4.5: 45.2 (#46), Qwen3.6 27B: —
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1476 | — |
Writing & Preference Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads
Claude Sonnet 4.5: 66.5 (#34), Qwen3.6 27B: 50.3 (#181)
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Qwen3.6 27B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1439 | — |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1442 | — |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1678 | — |
| WildBench | 85.4% | — |
| EQ-Bench 4 | — | 1026 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1465 | — |
Frequently asked questions
Is Claude Sonnet 4.5 better than Qwen3.6 27B?
Claude Sonnet 4.5 is the stronger model overall, scoring 44.1 to 42.2 on the Noometry Index. Qwen3.6 27B costs 4.4× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Sonnet 4.5's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Which is cheaper, Claude Sonnet 4.5 or Qwen3.6 27B?
Qwen3.6 27B is cheaper. It lists at $0.60 per million input tokens and $3.60 per million output tokens; Claude Sonnet 4.5 lists at $3 and $15.
Is Claude Sonnet 4.5 or Qwen3.6 27B better for coding?
Claude Sonnet 4.5 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 47.3 versus 39.1 in the Noometry coding category.
Which has the bigger context window?
Qwen3.6 27B does, with 262K tokens against 200K.
How many benchmarks do Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Qwen3.6 27B share?
10 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Sonnet 4.5 has 73 scored results on Noometry and Qwen3.6 27B has 11.