// head_to_head
GPT-5.6 Sol vs Qwen3 Max Thinking
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.
Qwen3 Max Thinking is the cheaper of the two; neither can be ranked on quality here.
Qwen3 Max Thinking does not have a published LiveBench run, so this comparison covers price, context and declared capabilities only. A missing score means "not evaluated", not "worse" — the right way to separate these two is an eval on your own workload.
openai
GPT-5.6 Sol
- Blended / 1M
- $4.00
- Context
- 1.1M
- Released
- Jul 9, 2026
- Overall score
- 81.1
qwen
Qwen3 Max Thinking
- Blended / 1M
- $1.56
- Context
- 262K
- Released
- Feb 9, 2026
- Overall score
- Not evaluated
Specs and pricing
| Metric | GPT-5.6 Sol | Qwen3 Max Thinking |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 81.1 | — |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $0.2870 | — |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $4.00 | $1.56win |
| Input price / 1M | $2.00 | $0.780win |
| Output price / 1M | $10.00 | $3.90win |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.200 | — |
| Context window | 1.1Mwin | 262K |
| Max output tokens | 128Kwin | 66K |
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 Sol on top, Qwen3 Max Thinking below, both out of 100.
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.
| Workload | GPT-5.6 Sol | Qwen3 Max Thinking |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $1,150/mo | $499.20/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $1,480/mo | $858.00/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $1,392/mo | $936.00/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $2,660/mo | $1,073/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $5,100/mo | $2,340/mo |
Which should you pick?
You need to fit large documents in one call
GPT-5.6 Sol
Wider context window — 1.1M against 262K.
You are cost-constrained
Qwen3 Max Thinking
Cheaper on blended list price at $1.56 per million tokens.
GPT-5.6 Sol vs Qwen3 Max Thinking FAQ
Which is better, GPT-5.6 Sol or Qwen3 Max Thinking?
Qwen3 Max Thinking is the cheaper of the two; neither can be ranked on quality here. Qwen3 Max Thinking does not have a published LiveBench run, so this comparison covers price, context and declared capabilities only. A missing score means "not evaluated", not "worse" — the right way to separate these two is an eval on your own workload.
Is GPT-5.6 Sol cheaper than Qwen3 Max Thinking?
Qwen3 Max Thinking is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, GPT-5.6 Sol lists at $4.00 per million tokens and Qwen3 Max Thinking at $1.56 — Qwen3 Max Thinking is 2.6× cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — GPT-5.6 Sol charges $2.00 in and $10.00 out, Qwen3 Max Thinking charges $0.780 and $3.90 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.
Does GPT-5.6 Sol or Qwen3 Max Thinking have a bigger context window?
GPT-5.6 Sol has the larger context window: 1.1M for GPT-5.6 Sol against 262K for Qwen3 Max Thinking. Note that a window you can fill is not a window you should fill — retrieval quality usually degrades well before the limit, and you pay for every token you put in it.
Do GPT-5.6 Sol and Qwen3 Max Thinking support prompt caching?
GPT-5.6 Sol publishes a cached-input rate of $0.200 per million tokens against a full input rate of $2.00. The catalogue lists no separate cached rate for Qwen3 Max Thinking, 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.
- Scores — LiveBench 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.