// head_to_head

GPT-5.6 Luna vs Qwen3.6 Plus

Published LiveBench scores across all seven categories, live list pricing, context windows, and the measured cost of a point of capability — for both models, side by side.

OpenRouter + LiveBenchAll comparisonsFull leaderboard

GPT-5.6 Luna wins outright — it scores higher and costs less.

GPT-5.6 Luna leads by 4.7 points overall while listing 1.6× cheaper per blended million tokens. There is no trade-off to reason about here; the only reason to pick the other is a constraint this table does not show, like an existing contract, a region, or a provider you are already on. GPT-5.6 Luna also leads on measured cost per point of capability, at $0.0911 per point.

openai

GPT-5.6 Luna

Blended / 1M
$0.450
Context
1.1M
Released
Jul 9, 2026
Overall score
73.6
reasoningtool callingfile inputimage inputprompt caching

qwen

Qwen3.6 Plus

Blended / 1M
$0.731
Context
1M
Released
Apr 2, 2026
Overall score
68.9
reasoningtool callingimage inputvideo input

Specs and pricing

MetricGPT-5.6 LunaQwen3.6 Plus
LiveBench overall

Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better.

73.6win68.9
Cost per point

Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability.

$0.0911win$0.1262
Blended price / 1M

3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic.

$0.450win$0.731
Input price / 1M$0.200win$0.325
Output price / 1M$1.20win$1.95
Cached input / 1M

Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one.

$0.020
Context window1.1M1M
Max output tokens128Kwin66K

Benchmarks by category

An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — GPT-5.6 Luna on top, Qwen3.6 Plus below, both out of 100.

Agentic coding
48.4
41.4
Coding
82.9
78.2
Reasoning
85.6
75.8
Mathematics
87.2
83.7
Data analysis
78.0
69.9
Language
72.6
75.0
Instruction following
60.1
58.3

What each one costs to run

Per-token prices are hard to feel. These are monthly list costs for both models across five workload shapes, using each provider's published cached-input rate where there is one.

WorkloadGPT-5.6 LunaQwen3.6 Plus
Support chatbot

1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests

$131.04/mo$234.00/mo
RAG assistant

8K in / 600 out × 100K requests

$160.00/mo$377.00/mo
Coding agent

40K in / 4K out × 20K requests

$155.20/mo$416.00/mo
Document extraction

20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests

$281.00/mo$471.25/mo
Bulk classification

500 in / 20 out × 5M requests

$530.00/mo$1007.50/mo
Run these two through the cost calculator

Which should you pick?

You are running this at volume

GPT-5.6 Luna

Lowest measured cost per point of capability at $0.0911 per point — the gap compounds with every request.

Quality matters more than the bill

GPT-5.6 Luna

Highest overall LiveBench score of the two at 73.6.

The workload is coding or agentic work

GPT-5.6 Luna

Leads on agentic coding — 48.4 against 41.4.

GPT-5.6 Luna vs Qwen3.6 Plus FAQ

Which is better, GPT-5.6 Luna or Qwen3.6 Plus?

GPT-5.6 Luna wins outright — it scores higher and costs less. GPT-5.6 Luna leads by 4.7 points overall while listing 1.6× cheaper per blended million tokens. There is no trade-off to reason about here; the only reason to pick the other is a constraint this table does not show, like an existing contract, a region, or a provider you are already on. GPT-5.6 Luna also leads on measured cost per point of capability, at $0.0911 per point.

Is GPT-5.6 Luna cheaper than Qwen3.6 Plus?

GPT-5.6 Luna is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, GPT-5.6 Luna lists at $0.450 per million tokens and Qwen3.6 Plus at $0.731 — GPT-5.6 Luna is 1.6× cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — GPT-5.6 Luna charges $0.200 in and $1.20 out, Qwen3.6 Plus charges $0.325 and $1.95 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.

GPT-5.6 Luna vs Qwen3.6 Plus: which scores higher on benchmarks?

GPT-5.6 Luna scores 73.6 and Qwen3.6 Plus scores 68.9 overall on LiveBench, the mean of its seven categories. That is a 4.7-point lead for GPT-5.6 Luna. Category scores differ from the overall figure — a model can lead on reasoning and trail on coding, which the per-category table above breaks out.

Which gives better value for money, GPT-5.6 Luna or Qwen3.6 Plus?

GPT-5.6 Luna. Cost per point divides the measured dollars LiveBench spent running the benchmark by the score it earned, so it captures something token pricing misses: a reasoning model can emit many times more tokens than its per-token rate suggests. GPT-5.6 Luna works out at $0.0911 per point and Qwen3.6 Plus at $0.1262.

Does GPT-5.6 Luna or Qwen3.6 Plus have a bigger context window?

They are effectively the same — 1.1M for GPT-5.6 Luna and 1M for Qwen3.6 Plus.

Do GPT-5.6 Luna and Qwen3.6 Plus support prompt caching?

GPT-5.6 Luna publishes a cached-input rate of $0.020 per million tokens against a full input rate of $0.200. The catalogue lists no separate cached rate for Qwen3.6 Plus, which means the provider does not price it separately here — not that caching is unavailable.

Related comparisons

How these numbers are produced

  • Price — provider list price from OpenRouter, refreshed every 15 minutes. “Blended” is a 3:1 input:output mix.
  • ScoresLiveBench release 2026-06-25, using their own category map. Each model shows its strongest published run. A blank means “not evaluated”, never “bad”.
  • Cost per point — the measured dollars LiveBench spent on the run, divided by the score it earned.
  • “Win” — awarded only past a threshold: one full point on a benchmark score, 10% on a price, 25% on a context window. Anything tighter reports as a tie, because effort settings alone move a LiveBench score by more than that.

Published benchmarks rank models on someone else's tasks. Before committing, see LLM & agent evaluation for building an eval on your own.