Abstract: Panels wrinkling behaviors may occur when composite soft-core sandwich structures subjected to coplanar compression loads. Once the panels wrinkling appears, the sandwich structures will lose its load-bearing capacity. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an accurate model to predict the wrinkling behaviors of soft-core sandwich structures. Sandwich structure wrinkling is a typical three-dimensional (3D) problem, and few high-order models can accurately predict such issues. Therefore, this paper proposed an enhanced higher-order model including the local deformation and the 3D effects. Based on the proposed theory, the beam element formulation was derived, and the wrinkling behaviors of sandwich structures with different boundary conditions were analyzed. By comparing with the quasi-3D elasticity solution and the 3D finite element results, accuracy of the proposed method has been verified. In order to improve the capability of sandwich structures resisting the wrinkling deformation, this work attempted to use composite face sheets instead of metal panel in the sandwich structure. Numerical results show that the developed enhanced high-order model can accurately predict the wrinkling behaviors of the composite sandwich structures, and the use of composite panels can effectively resist the wrinkling behaviors of sandwich structures.