Comprehensive side-by-side LLM comparison
Qwen3-Max offers 6.3K more tokens in context window than Claude Sonnet 4.6. Qwen3-Max is $16.00 cheaper per million tokens. Claude Sonnet 4.6 supports multimodal inputs. Claude Sonnet 4.6 is available on 3 providers. Both models have their strengths depending on your specific coding needs.
Anthropic
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is a general-purpose language model from Anthropic, released in February 2026 as an update to the Sonnet 4 line that introduced adaptive thinking — a mode where the model automatically calibrates its reasoning depth based on task complexity rather than requiring manual configuration by the developer. The model accepts text and image inputs and integrates natively with web search and code execution tools, consolidating capabilities that previously required separate toolchain setup into a unified API surface. It became the primary workhorse model in the Claude 4 series for code assistance, agentic pipelines, and retrieval-augmented applications that benefit from built-in web access.
Alibaba / Qwen
Qwen3-Max, released by Alibaba in September 2025 as an API preview, is a large language model exceeding one trillion parameters built for complex reasoning and long-context tasks. It features a 262K token context window, hybrid thinking modes that allow switching between direct generation and extended chain-of-thought, and is available as a proprietary cloud API via Alibaba Cloud and Qwen Chat. Qwen3-Max targets demanding reasoning, multilingual analysis, and applications requiring frontier-level performance from the Qwen3 generation.
5 months newer
Qwen3-Max
Alibaba / Qwen
2025-09-05

Claude Sonnet 4.6
Anthropic
2026-02-17
Cost per million tokens (USD)
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Qwen3-Max
Context window and performance specifications
Claude Sonnet 4.6
2025-08
Available providers and their performance metrics
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Anthropic
AWS Bedrock
Google Cloud Vertex AI
Qwen3-Max
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Qwen3-Max
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Qwen3-Max
OpenRouter