Qwen: Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 vs Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Qwen: Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 | Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | qwen | anthropic |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | - | 80.1 |
| Input Price | $0.30/M | $3.00/M |
| Output Price | $1.80/M | $15.00/M |
| Context Window | 1,000,000 | 1,000,000 |
| Max Output | 65,536 | 128,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | - | 77.9 |
| ai_index_agentic | - | 67.3 |
| ai_index_coding | - | 100.0 |
| aider_polyglot | - | 61.3 |
| eqbench | - | 68.4 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 costs $0.75 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs $6.75, so Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 is about 9.0 times cheaper for the same work.
Both read up to 1,000,000 tokens at once, roughly 1,500 pages of text.
Only Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 offers video input.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 scores higher on 2 (Code Completion, Bulk Data Labeling), Claude Sonnet 4.6 on 18 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 was released in April 2026 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 in February 2026.
Pick Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 if you need lower cost or video input; pick Claude Sonnet 4.6 if you need the stronger all-round task scores.
Costs use current list prices per million tokens; page counts assume about 0.75 words per token and 500 words per page.
Who wins by task?
| Task | Qwen: Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 | Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 133 | 183 |
| Code Review | 132 | 183 |
| Code Completion | 131 | 120 |
| Code Refactoring | 136 | 179 |
| Bug Fixing | 136 | 196 |
| Unit Test Generation | 124 | 166 |
| Code Documentation | 131 | 148 |
| Regex Writing | 119 | 139 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 120 | 155 |
| Frontend Component Design | 122 | 154 |
| Data Analysis | 124 | 183 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 133 | 163 |
| ETL Scripting | 128 | 167 |
| JSON Extraction | 131 | 142 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 129 | 124 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 131 | 152 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 131 | 152 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 137 | 172 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 123 | 124 |
| Blog Post Writing | 121 | 147 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →