Qwen3-Max
Alibaba (Qwen)·Sep 2025reasoningproprietary
80.5
modhub Index
Qwen3-Max is the closed-weights crown of the Qwen family, a trillion-parameter-scale MoE served through Alibaba Cloud. It competes in the tier just below US flagships on reasoning and coding while undercutting them sharply on price, and its thinking variant posts elite math results. For teams already in the Qwen ecosystem — or serving Asian-language traffic, where Qwen models excel — it is the premium option.
Benchmark results
Where it shines
- Trillion-parameter scale with strong agentic performance
- Excellent multilingual quality, especially CJK languages
- Significantly cheaper than US frontier flagships
Alternatives to Qwen3-Max
OpenAI's flagship reasoning model with a 1M-token context window, built for hard coding, science and long-horizon agentic work.
A compact reasoning model that punched far above its price on math — 92.7% on AIME 2025 at $1.10 per million input tokens.
Google's November 2025 frontier breakout — 91.9% GPQA Diamond and 37.5% HLE made it the reasoning leader of its generation.
Google's 2025 workhorse flagship — first mainstream thinking model with a 1M context, still widely deployed.
Frequently asked questions
- How much does the Qwen3-Max API cost?
- Qwen3-Max costs $1.2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, with cached input at $0.24 per million. A workload of 10M input and 1.5M output tokens per month costs about $21.00.
- What is the context window of Qwen3-Max?
- Qwen3-Max supports a context window of 262,144 tokens (262K), with up to 66K output tokens per response.
- Is Qwen3-Max open source?
- No — Qwen3-Max is a proprietary model available through Alibaba (Qwen)'s API and partner platforms.
- What are the best alternatives to Qwen3-Max?
- The closest alternatives by overall capability are GPT-5.5, OpenAI o4-mini, Gemini 3 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Pro. See the comparison pages for detailed head-to-head breakdowns.