GPT-5.6 Sol vs Qwen 3
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •GPT-5.6 Sol is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (88 vs 30 on our capability index).
- •Qwen 3 is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (90 vs 55).
- •Qwen 3 is open-weights (free to self-host); GPT-5.6 Sol is paid API only.
Specs comparison
| GPT-5.6 Sol | Qwen 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | Alibaba (Qwen Team) |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | Not announced | ✓128K tokens (32K for 0.6B/1.7B/4B dense variants) |
| Input / 1M tokens | $5.00 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $30.00 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2026-06 | 2025-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | GPT-5.6 Sol | Qwen 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | 88.8% | - |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Ultra) | 91.9% | - |
| ExploitBench | competitive with Mythos Preview | - |
| 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 GPT-5.6 Sol if...
- →You are an approved preview partner needing the most capable model for agentic software engineering
- →Complex multi-step tasks that benefit from subagent orchestration (Ultra) or maximum reasoning depth (max)
- →Frontier scientific research, professional knowledge work, or security-sensitive workloads
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