Cheaper alternatives to Qwen3.6 Max Preview
Qwen LMArena 1446.3 $2.31/M on a balanced workload prices as of 2026-08-28
10 models are both better and cheaper, giving up nothing.
Of the 133 models carrying both an independent score and a published price at the same delivery mode, 11 score at least as high as Qwen3.6 Max Preview and cost no more under at least one workload. 10 match or beat it on every capability we hold — context, maximum output, input modes, tool use and extended reasoning. 1 does not, and every row names what it drops.
Dominance is not a property of a model. It is a property of a model, a capability lens and a workload, and all three are named on every row. Scores are LMArena Elo, used under CC BY 4.0 from the official dataset; prices are blended per million tokens. A higher score is not a drop-in replacement.
This page is built from that comparison and nothing else. When no model is both better and cheaper than Qwen3.6 Max Preview, it is not generated.
Where it holds
| Workload | Qwen3.6 Max Preview $/M | Better and cheaper | With a trade |
|---|---|---|---|
| Balanced | $2.31 | 8 | 1 |
| Summarise | $1.28 | 8 | 1 |
| Chat | $3.08 | 9 | 1 |
| Code gen | $4.11 | 8 | 1 |
| Agentic | $1.80 | 10 | 1 |
Workload mixes are defined on the methodology page. Cached input is priced at the cached rate, and reasoning tokens at the worse of the reasoning and output rates.
What you would be replacing
| Intelligence | 1446.3 |
|---|---|
| Context window | 262K |
| Max output | 66K |
| Input modes | text |
| Tool use | yes |
| Extended reasoning | yes |
A replacement has to clear every line above, not just the score. Full record for Qwen3.6 Max Preview.
Better and cheaper, nothing given up 10
Each of these matches or beats Qwen3.6 Max Preview on context, maximum output, input modes, tool use and reasoning, scores at least as high, and costs no more.
| # | Model | Intelligence | $/M | Holds under |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gemini 3.7 Flash Google | 1490.2 +43.9 | $0.750 |
|
| 2 | Gemini 3.6 Flash Google | 1476.5 +30.2 | $1.50 |
|
| 3 | Muse Spark 1.1 Meta | 1478.3 +32 | $2.00 |
|
| 4 | GLM 5.3 Z.ai | 1476.9 +30.6 | $2.15 |
|
| 5 | MiMo-V2.5-Pro Xiaomi | 1465 +18.7 | $0.544 |
|
| 6 | GLM 5.2 Z.ai | 1465.4 +19.1 | $1.83 |
|
| 7 | Qwen3.7 Plus Qwen | 1456.2 tie | $0.560 |
|
| 8 | Kimi K2.6 Moonshot AI | 1455 tie | $1.71 |
|
| 9 | Qwen3.8 Max Qwen | 1481.9 +35.6 | $3.08 chat |
|
| 10 | Grok 4.5 xAI | 1452.3 tie | $1.59 agentic |
|
Cheaper and higher-scoring, but you give something up 1
These score at least as high and cost no more on the two plotted axes, and lose something that is not on them. Read the last column before switching.
| Model | Intelligence | $/M | Holds under | What you give up |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GLM 5.1 Z.ai | 1464.1 +17.8 | $1.94 |
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What this compares, and what it leaves out
- Quality is LMArena Elo, used under CC BY 4.0 from the official dataset. The 95% confidence interval on a difference between two scores is about ±10.68 points, so a gap smaller than that is marked tie rather than an improvement — see significance bands.
- 188 further models at this delivery mode carry a price but no independent score. They are absent from the comparison in both directions — unrated is not a zero, and an unmeasured model is neither an alternative nor a worse buy.
- Retired models are never offered as an alternative, and a model only competes against its own delivery mode: batch trades latency for price, so it is not a like-for-like swap.
- Nothing here measures latency, throughput, rate limits or how a model behaves on your prompts. Two models with the same index score are not interchangeable.
- The models that nothing beats on both axes are on the value frontier, and every other model something cheaper beats is listed here.