The Known Good Updated 25 Jul 2026
Microsoft: Phi 4 vs Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus ·Microsoft vs Alibaba

Microsoft: Phi 4 vs Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus — head-to-head comparison

Microsoft: Phi 4 profile Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus profile All comparisons
Microsoft: Phi 4 — Microsoft
Quality
#50 of 61
33based on 3 of 6 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#142 of 316
56.1
Output tokens per second
Price
#40 of 340
$0.09
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.07 · Out $0.14
Cache hit price
unranked
—
per 1M tokens
Context
#334 of 345
16k
tokens (~25 pages)
Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus — Alibaba
Quality
#18 of 61
78based on 3 of 6 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#171 of 316
47.4
Output tokens per second
Price
#167 of 340
$0.73
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.33 · Out $1.95
Cache hit price
#63 of 206
$0.050
per 1M tokens (−85%)
Context
#54 of 345
1.00M
tokens (~1,500 pages)
Summary

On the Known Good Index, Microsoft: Phi 4 scores 33 and Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus scores 78 — a 45-point lead for Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus. They share 2 published evaluations, with Microsoft: Phi 4 ahead on 0 and Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus ahead on 2.

Blended pricing is $0.09 per 1M tokens for Microsoft: Phi 4 and $0.73 for Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus — Microsoft: Phi 4 is about 8.4× cheaper.

Throughput is 56 tokens per second for Microsoft: Phi 4 and 47 for Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus, with time to first token at 0.2s and 1.0s. Microsoft: Phi 4 accepts 16k tokens of context against 1.00M.

Microsoft: Phi 4 is open weights under Open weights (unrestricted); Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus is proprietary. 2 tracked hosts serve one or both.

Generated from tracked data on 25 Jul 2026 · how these comparisons are computed →

At a glance
MetricMicrosoft: Phi 4Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Known Good Index 33 based on 3 of 6 evaluations 78 based on 3 of 6 evaluations
Blended $/1M $0.09 $0.73
Output tok/s 56 47
Context window 16k 1.00M
Providers 1 1
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Quality

Known Good Index and the capability indices, side by side

IndicesComponents
Index scores

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

MetricMicrosoft: Phi 4Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Known Good Index 33 78
Mathematics Index 39 91
Science Index 53 91
Reasoning Index 47 —
Agentic Index — 51
Openness Index 60 5
The Known Good

Quality Breakdown

Every evaluation both models report a published score for

Evaluations both models report

Bar = Microsoft: Phi 4 · marker = Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus · scores ingested from Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)

GPQA Diamond56 / 87
MATH / AIME14 / 91

Right-hand figures read Microsoft: Phi 4 / Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus. Microsoft: Phi 4 leads on 0 of 2, Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus on 2.

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.

MetricMicrosoft: Phi 4Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Text Arena 1,217 1,437
Text Arena (style controlled) 1,256 1,444
The Known Good

Price & Cost

Published API pricing by token type

Per token typeCache discount
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.

MetricMicrosoft: Phi 4Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Input $/1M $0.07 $0.33
Output $/1M $0.14 $1.95
Blended $/1M $0.09 $0.73
Cache read $/1M — $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.

MetricMicrosoft: Phi 4Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Context window 16k 1.00M
Max output tokens 16k 66k
The Known Good

Speed & Latency

Median throughput and time to first token across hosting providers

Output speedTime to first token
Throughput and latency

Medians across all tracked providers, derived from OpenRouter endpoint telemetry.

MetricMicrosoft: Phi 4Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Output tokens/s 56 47
Time to first token 0.2s 1.0s
The Known Good

Providers

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

2 hosts
Full provider benchmarks →
Provider Microsoft: Phi 4 blendedMicrosoft: Phi 4 tok/s Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus blendedQwen: Qwen3.6 Plus tok/s
DeepInfra $0.09 70 — —
Alibaba · first party — — $0.73 53

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 →