# 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.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/codestral-vs-qwen3-6-max-preview
- Last updated: 2026-10-11
- Shared benchmarks: 0

## 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.

## Snapshot

| | Codestral | Qwen3.6 Max Preview |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | Alibaba (Qwen) |
| Noometry Index | 30.6 | 51.5 |
| Rank | 290 | 43 |
| Context | 256K | 262K |
| Input $/M | $0.30 | $1.30 |
| Output $/M | $0.90 | $7.80 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Proprietary |

## Coding

- 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

- Codestral: —
- Qwen3.6 Max Preview: —

| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3.6 Max Preview |
|---|---|---|
| Vending-Bench 2 | — | 4,254 |

## Reasoning

- 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

- 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

- 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

- 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

- Codestral: —
- Qwen3.6 Max Preview: 75.7 (#55)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3.6 Max Preview |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | — | 1438 |

## Long Context

- Codestral: —
- Qwen3.6 Max Preview: 44.6 (#61)

| Benchmark | Codestral | Qwen3.6 Max Preview |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1457 |

## Writing & Preference

- 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 |

## FAQ

### 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.