Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Qwen 3
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Sonnet 4.6 is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (82 vs 30 on our capability index).
- •Qwen 3 is open-weights (free to self-host); Claude Sonnet 4.6 is paid API only.
- •Claude Sonnet 4.6 has a 1M context window vs 128K tokens (32K for 0.6B/1.7B/4B dense variants) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Qwen 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Alibaba (Qwen Team) |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | ✓1M | 128K tokens (32K for 0.6B/1.7B/4B dense variants) |
| Input / 1M tokens | $3.00 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $15.00 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2026-02 | 2025-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Qwen 3 |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 79.6% | - |
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 | 59.1% | - |
| OSWorld-Verified | 72.5% | - |
| GPQA | 79.7% | - |
| Qwen3-235B-A22B | - | 235B total / 22B active |
| Qwen3-30B-A3B | - | 30B total / 3B active |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose Claude Sonnet 4.6 if...
- →You have an existing integration pinned to Sonnet 4.6 and want stability
- →You need a proven mid-tier model with 1M context at $3/$15
- →You want predictable behavior without the new-tokenizer/thinking changes in Sonnet 5
- →You are cost-sensitive and don't need Sonnet 5's incremental gains
Choose Qwen 3 if...
- →You need an open, self-hostable model with a permissive license
- →You want to toggle deep reasoning on or off per request
- →Multilingual applications
- →Efficient inference via MoE with few active parameters