Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Qwen3-235B-A22B
Benchmarks, API pricing and specs, head to head. Data updated 2026-06-10.
Anthropic · Apr 2026
Anthropic's mid-tier workhorse: near-Opus capability at $3/$15, and the leader on the Finance Agent benchmark.
Alibaba (Qwen) · Jul 2025
The most popular open general-purpose Qwen: 235B MoE with hybrid thinking, a staple of the 2025 open-source ecosystem.
The verdict
These two models don't yet share verified results on the benchmarks we track, so judge them on specs, pricing and intended use. On price the gap is dramatic: Qwen3-235B-A22B works out roughly 16x cheaper per blended million tokens. Claude Sonnet 4.6 also takes 1M of context versus 262K for Qwen3-235B-A22B. And Qwen3-235B-A22B is open-weights (Apache 2.0), so it can be self-hosted — a structural advantage if data control or vendor independence matters.
Specs & pricing
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Qwen3-235B-A22B | |
|---|---|---|
| modhub Index | — | 69.0 |
| Input price / 1M | $3 | $0.22 |
| Output price / 1M | $15 | $0.88 |
| Context window | 1M | 262K |
| Max output | 64K | 33K |
| Open weights | no | yes (Apache 2.0) |
| Reasoning model | yes | yes |
| Multimodal input | text, image | text |
| Knowledge cutoff | Jan 2026 | Apr 2025 |
| Released | Apr 2026 | Jul 2025 |
| Example monthly cost* | $52.50 | $3.52 |
* 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 Sonnet 4.6 or Qwen3-235B-A22B?
- These two models don't yet share verified results on the benchmarks we track, so judge them on specs, pricing and intended use. On price the gap is dramatic: Qwen3-235B-A22B works out roughly 16x cheaper per blended million tokens. Claude Sonnet 4.6 also takes 1M of context versus 262K for Qwen3-235B-A22B. And Qwen3-235B-A22B is open-weights (Apache 2.0), so it can be self-hosted — a structural advantage if data control or vendor independence matters.
- Which is cheaper, Claude Sonnet 4.6 or Qwen3-235B-A22B?
- Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs $3/$15 per million input/output tokens, while Qwen3-235B-A22B costs $0.22/$0.88. For a typical workload of 10M input and 1.5M output tokens per month, that's $52.50 versus $3.52.
- Which model is better for coding, Claude Sonnet 4.6 or Qwen3-235B-A22B?
- We don't yet track SWE-bench Verified results for both models; check their individual pages for coding-related scores.