The Known Good Updated 25 Jul 2026
OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini vs Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus ·OpenAI vs Alibaba

OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini vs Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus — head-to-head comparison

OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini profile Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus profile All comparisons
OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini — OpenAI
Quality
#34 of 61
60based on 5 of 6 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#47 of 316
99.9
Output tokens per second
Price
#162 of 340
$0.69
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.25 · Out $2.00
Cache hit price
#39 of 206
$0.025
per 1M tokens (−90%)
Context
#104 of 345
400k
tokens (~600 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, OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini scores 60 and Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus scores 78 — a 17-point lead for Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus. They share 3 published evaluations, with OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini ahead on 1 and Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus ahead on 2.

Blended pricing is $0.69 per 1M tokens for OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini and $0.73 for Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus, within 10% of each other.

Throughput is 100 tokens per second for OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini and 47 for Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus, with time to first token at 3.3s and 1.0s. OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini accepts 400k tokens of context against 1.00M.

OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini is proprietary; Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus is proprietary. 3 tracked hosts serve one or both.

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

At a glance
MetricOpenAI: GPT-5 MiniQwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Known Good Index 60 based on 5 of 6 evaluations 78 based on 3 of 6 evaluations
Blended $/1M $0.69 $0.73
Output tok/s 100 47
Context window 400k 1.00M
Providers 2 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.

MetricOpenAI: GPT-5 MiniQwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Known Good Index 60 78
Coding Index 50 —
Mathematics Index 93 91
Science Index 76 91
Reasoning Index 57 —
Agentic Index 50 51
Openness Index 5 5
The Known Good

Quality Breakdown

Every evaluation both models report a published score for

Evaluations both models report

Bar = OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini · marker = Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus · scores ingested from Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)

GPQA Diamond75 / 87
MATH / AIME87 / 91
SWE-bench Verified65 / 58

Right-hand figures read OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini / Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus. OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini leads on 1 of 3, 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.

MetricOpenAI: GPT-5 MiniQwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Text Arena — 1,437
Text Arena (style controlled) — 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.

MetricOpenAI: GPT-5 MiniQwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Input $/1M $0.25 $0.33
Output $/1M $2.00 $1.95
Blended $/1M $0.69 $0.73
Cache read $/1M $0.025 $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.

MetricOpenAI: GPT-5 MiniQwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Context window 400k 1.00M
Max output tokens 128k 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.

MetricOpenAI: GPT-5 MiniQwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Output tokens/s 100 47
Time to first token 3.3s 1.0s
The Known Good

Providers

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

3 hosts
Full provider benchmarks →
Provider OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini blendedOpenAI: GPT-5 Mini tok/s Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus blendedQwen: Qwen3.6 Plus tok/s
OpenAI · first party $0.34 142 — —
Azure · first party $0.69 78 — —
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 →