The Known Good Updated 24 Oct 2026 Subscribe
Google: Gemini 3 Flash Preview vs Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus ·Google vs Alibaba

Google: Gemini 3 Flash Preview vs Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus — head-to-head comparison

Google: Gemini 3 Flash Preview profile Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus profile All comparisons
Google: Gemini 3 Flash Preview — Google
Quality
#15 of 65
83based on 4 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#55 of 353
118.0
Output tokens per second
Price
#297 of 525
$1.12
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.50 · Out $3.00
Cache hit price
#163 of 412
$0.050
per 1M tokens (−90%)
Context
#120 of 574
1.05M
tokens (~1,600 pages)
Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus — Alibaba
Quality
#19 of 65
78based on 3 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#267 of 353
46.3
Output tokens per second
Price
#237 of 525
$0.73
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.33 · Out $1.95
Cache hit price
#155 of 412
$0.050
per 1M tokens (−85%)
Context
#176 of 574
1.00M
tokens (~1,500 pages)
Summary

On the Known Good Index, Google: Gemini 3 Flash Preview scores 83 and Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus scores 78 — a 4-point lead for Google: Gemini 3 Flash Preview. They share 3 published evaluations, with Google: Gemini 3 Flash Preview ahead on 3 and Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus ahead on 0.

Blended pricing is $1.12 per 1M tokens for Google: Gemini 3 Flash Preview and $0.73 for Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus — Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus is about 1.5× cheaper.

Throughput is 118 tokens per second for Google: Gemini 3 Flash Preview and 46 for Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus, with time to first token at 1.5s and 1.0s. Google: Gemini 3 Flash Preview accepts 1.05M tokens of context against 1.00M.

Google: Gemini 3 Flash Preview is proprietary; Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus is proprietary. 3 tracked hosts serve one or both.

Generated from tracked data on 24 Oct 2026 · how these comparisons are computed →

At a glance
MetricGoogle: Gemini 3 Flash PreviewQwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Known Good Index 83 based on 4 of 7 evaluations 78 based on 3 of 7 evaluations
Blended $/1M $1.12 $0.73
Output tok/s 118 46
Context window 1.05M 1.00M
Providers 2 1
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Quality

Known Good Index and the capability indices, side by side

Index scores

Each index is min-max normalised across tracked models and scaled 0–100 from published evaluations. We do not run these evaluations.

MetricGoogle: Gemini 3 Flash PreviewQwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Known Good Index 83 78
Coding Index 72 —
Openness Index 5 5
The Known Good

Quality Breakdown

Every evaluation both models report a published score for

Evaluations both models report

Bar = Google: Gemini 3 Flash Preview · marker = Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus · scores ingested from Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)

GPQA Diamond89 / 88
Mock AIME 2024–2596 / 93
SWE-bench Verified75 / 58

Right-hand figures read Google: Gemini 3 Flash Preview / Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus. Google: Gemini 3 Flash Preview leads on 3 of 3, Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus on 0.

The Known Good

Arena Elo

Human preference rating from blind pairwise votes

Arena ratings

Elo from blind pairwise votes, ingested from Arena. Higher is better.

MetricGoogle: Gemini 3 Flash PreviewQwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Text Arena — 1,436
Text Arena (style controlled) — 1,443
The Known Good

Price & Cost

Published API pricing by token type

Published pricing

USD per 1M tokens. Blended is a 3:1 input:output mix. Live from OpenRouter, cross-checked against models.dev. Lower is better.

MetricGoogle: Gemini 3 Flash PreviewQwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Input $/1M $0.50 $0.33
Output $/1M $3.00 $1.95
Blended $/1M $1.12 $0.73
Cache read $/1M $0.050 $0.050
The Known Good
We publish blended price rather than cost-per-task. Cost-per-task requires token counts from an evaluation suite we do not run. Blended price is computed from published rates and is fully reproducible — see the pricing methodology.

Context Window

Maximum input accepted and maximum output emitted

Context and output limits

Provider-declared limits, from metadata via models.dev and OpenRouter. Higher is better.

MetricGoogle: Gemini 3 Flash PreviewQwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Context window 1.05M 1.00M
Max output tokens 66k 66k
The Known Good

Speed & Latency

Mean throughput and time to first token across hosting providers, over successful measurements from the last 48 hours

Throughput and latency

Means across all tracked providers over successful measurements from the last 48 hours, derived from OpenRouter endpoint telemetry.

MetricGoogle: Gemini 3 Flash PreviewQwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Output tokens/s 118 46
Time to first token 1.5s 1.0s
The Known Good

Providers

Which hosts serve each model, and at what price and speed

3 hosts
Full provider benchmarks →
Provider Google: Gemini 3 Flash Preview blendedGoogle: Gemini 3 Flash Preview tok/s Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus blendedQwen: Qwen3.6 Plus tok/s
Google · first party $0.56 150 — —
Google AI Studio $0.56 115 — —
Alibaba · first party — — $0.73 39

Per-host pricing and telemetry from OpenRouter. A dash means that host does not serve that model.

The Known Good
Sources for this page
Pricing & providers — OpenRouter Metadata — models.dev Benchmarks — Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)Elo — Arena Full attribution →