Claude Opus 4.5 vs Qwen3-Max
Benchmarks, API pricing and specs, head to head. Data updated 2026-06-10.
Claude Opus 4.5
Anthropic · Nov 2025
The November 2025 Opus that cut flagship pricing 3x to $5/$25 and was the first model past 80% on SWE-bench Verified.
Qwen3-Max
80.5Alibaba (Qwen) · Sep 2025
Alibaba's trillion-parameter API flagship — frontier-adjacent quality with strong agentic tool use at mid-tier prices.
The verdict
Claude Opus 4.5 wins 2 of the 2 benchmarks these models share, against 0 for Qwen3-Max. On price the gap is dramatic: Qwen3-Max works out roughly 4.2x cheaper per blended million tokens. Qwen3-Max also takes 262K of context versus 200K for Claude Opus 4.5.
Benchmark head-to-head 2–0
Specs & pricing
| Claude Opus 4.5 | Qwen3-Max | |
|---|---|---|
| modhub Index | — | 80.5 |
| Input price / 1M | $5 | $1.2 |
| Output price / 1M | $25 | $6 |
| Context window | 200K | 262K |
| Max output | 64K | 66K |
| Open weights | no | no |
| Reasoning model | yes | yes |
| Multimodal input | text, image | text |
| Knowledge cutoff | Mar 2025 | Jun 2025 |
| Released | Nov 2025 | Sep 2025 |
| Example monthly cost* | $87.50 | $21.00 |
* 10M input + 1.5M output tokens per month at list prices, no caching. Green = better value on that row.
Frequently asked questions
- Which is better, Claude Opus 4.5 or Qwen3-Max?
- Claude Opus 4.5 wins 2 of the 2 benchmarks these models share, against 0 for Qwen3-Max. On price the gap is dramatic: Qwen3-Max works out roughly 4.2x cheaper per blended million tokens. Qwen3-Max also takes 262K of context versus 200K for Claude Opus 4.5.
- Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.5 or Qwen3-Max?
- Claude Opus 4.5 costs $5/$25 per million input/output tokens, while Qwen3-Max costs $1.2/$6. For a typical workload of 10M input and 1.5M output tokens per month, that's $87.50 versus $21.00.
- Which model is better for coding, Claude Opus 4.5 or Qwen3-Max?
- On SWE-bench Verified — the standard agentic-coding benchmark — Claude Opus 4.5 scores 80.9% versus 69.6% for Qwen3-Max, making Claude Opus 4.5 the stronger pick for coding agents.