Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus vs OpenAI: GPT-5.4 Mini
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus | OpenAI: GPT-5.4 Mini | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | qwen | openai |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 68.3 | 70.8 |
| Input Price | $0.33/M | $0.75/M |
| Output Price | $1.95/M | $4.50/M |
| Context Window | 1,000,000 | 400,000 |
| Max Output | 65,536 | 128,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 65.3 | 66.0 |
| ai_index_agentic | 45.5 | 49.8 |
| ai_index_coding | 90.0 | 92.5 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Qwen3.6 Plus costs $0.81 and GPT-5.4 Mini costs $1.88, so Qwen3.6 Plus is about 2.3 times cheaper for the same work.
Qwen3.6 Plus reads up to 1,000,000 tokens at once, roughly 1,500 pages of text, against about 600 pages for GPT-5.4 Mini.
Only Qwen3.6 Plus offers video input.
On our blended benchmark score GPT-5.4 Mini leads 70.8 to 68.3.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Qwen3.6 Plus scores higher on 6 (Code Completion, Code Documentation, Regex Writing and others), GPT-5.4 Mini on 14 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
Qwen3.6 Plus was released in April 2026 and GPT-5.4 Mini in March 2026.
Pick Qwen3.6 Plus if you need lower cost, long documents or video input; pick GPT-5.4 Mini if you need benchmark performance or 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: Qwen3.6 Plus | OpenAI: GPT-5.4 Mini |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 163 | 164 |
| Code Review | 158 | 159 |
| Code Completion | 132 | 132 |
| Code Refactoring | 157 | 158 |
| Bug Fixing | 168 | 170 |
| Unit Test Generation | 148 | 148 |
| Code Documentation | 140 | 140 |
| Regex Writing | 132 | 132 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 139 | 139 |
| Frontend Component Design | 141 | 141 |
| Data Analysis | 159 | 160 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 151 | 151 |
| ETL Scripting | 148 | 149 |
| JSON Extraction | 146 | 146 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 134 | 133 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 144 | 144 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 144 | 144 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 154 | 154 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 130 | 129 |
| Blog Post Writing | 135 | 136 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →