Model comparison
Codestral vs Qwen3.6 Max Preview
Qwen3.6 Max Preview is the stronger model overall, scoring 51.5 to 30.6 on the Noometry Index. Codestral costs 6.5× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Qwen3.6 Max Preview's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Last verified . 0 shared benchmarks.
Mistral AI
Alibaba (Qwen)Summary
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Qwen3.6 Max Preview leads 41.7 to 19.8.
- Codestral is cheaper at $0.30 / $0.90 per million input/output tokens, against $1.30 / $7.80 for Qwen3.6 Max Preview.
- Qwen3.6 Max Preview accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 256K.
Side by side
| Codestral | Qwen3.6 Max Preview | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | Alibaba (Qwen) |
| Noometry Index | 30.6 | 51.5 |
| Released | 2024-05-29 | 2026-04-20 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Context window | 256K | 262K |
| Max output | 8K | 66K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $0.30 | $1.30 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $0.90 | $7.80 |
| Results tracked | 7 | 29 |
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Category by category
Coding Qwen3.6 Max Preview leads
Codestral: 27.3 (#321), Qwen3.6 Max Preview: 48.7 (#54)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3.6 Max Preview |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | — | 76.7% |
| Aider Polyglot | 11.1% | — |
| LMArena WebDev | — | 1482 |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 41.8% | — |
| LMArena Coding | — | 1471 |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 52.5% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 137.78 | — |
| HumanEval+ | 73.8% | — |
| MBPP+ | 61.9% | — |
Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable
Codestral: —, Qwen3.6 Max Preview: —
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3.6 Max Preview |
|---|---|---|
| Vending-Bench 2 | — | 4,254 |
Reasoning Qwen3.6 Max Preview leads
Codestral: 19.8 (#251), Qwen3.6 Max Preview: 41.7 (#53)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3.6 Max Preview |
|---|---|---|
| SimpleBench | — | 63% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 32.5% | — |
| NYT Connections (extended) | — | 74.1% |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 20% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | — | 1457 |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | — | 19% |
| DTBench | — | 87.2% |
| LMCA | — | 42.5% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 149.24 |
Math Not comparable
Codestral: —, Qwen3.6 Max Preview: 54.1 (#46)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3.6 Max Preview |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 91.1% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1465 |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | — | 23.1% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | — | 4.2% |
Knowledge Not comparable
Codestral: —, Qwen3.6 Max Preview: 57.6 (#39)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3.6 Max Preview |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | — | 87.4% |
| SimpleQA Verified | — | 52% |
| LMArena Expert | — | 1478 |
Multilingual Not comparable
Codestral: —, Qwen3.6 Max Preview: 54.2 (#48)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3.6 Max Preview |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | — | 1437 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1487 |
| LMArena French | — | 1449 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1445 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1454 |
Instruction Following Not comparable
Codestral: —, Qwen3.6 Max Preview: 75.7 (#55)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3.6 Max Preview |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | — | 1438 |
Long Context Not comparable
Codestral: —, Qwen3.6 Max Preview: 44.6 (#61)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3.6 Max Preview |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1457 |
Writing & Preference Not comparable
Codestral: —, Qwen3.6 Max Preview: 63.8 (#60)
| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3.6 Max Preview |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | — | 1447 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | — | 1435 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | — | 1456 |
Frequently asked questions
Is Codestral better than Qwen3.6 Max Preview?
Qwen3.6 Max Preview is the stronger model overall, scoring 51.5 to 30.6 on the Noometry Index. Codestral costs 6.5× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Qwen3.6 Max Preview's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Which is cheaper, Codestral or Qwen3.6 Max Preview?
Codestral is cheaper. It lists at $0.30 per million input tokens and $0.90 per million output tokens; Qwen3.6 Max Preview lists at $1.30 and $7.80.
Is Codestral or Qwen3.6 Max Preview better for coding?
Qwen3.6 Max Preview scores higher on coding benchmarks: 48.7 versus 27.3 in the Noometry coding category.
Which has the bigger context window?
Qwen3.6 Max Preview does, with 262K tokens against 256K.
How many benchmarks do Codestral and Qwen3.6 Max Preview share?
0 benchmarks have published results for both models. Codestral has 7 scored results on Noometry and Qwen3.6 Max Preview has 29.