Claude Fable 5 vs Qwen 3
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Fable 5 is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (92 vs 30 on our capability index).
- •Qwen 3 is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (90 vs 55).
- •Qwen 3 is open-weights (free to self-host); Claude Fable 5 is paid API only.
- •Claude Fable 5 has a 1M context window vs 128K tokens (32K for 0.6B/1.7B/4B dense variants) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Claude Fable 5 | Qwen 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Alibaba (Qwen Team) |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | ✓1M | 128K tokens (32K for 0.6B/1.7B/4B dense variants) |
| Input / 1M tokens | $10.00 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $50.00 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2026-06 | 2025-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Fable 5 | Qwen 3 |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 95.0% | - |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | 88.0% | - |
| GPQA Diamond | 92.6% | - |
| SWE-bench Pro | 80.3% | - |
| Qwen3-235B-A22B | - | 235B total / 22B active |
| Qwen3-30B-A3B | - | 30B total / 3B active |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose Claude Fable 5 if...
- →You need the absolute highest capability Anthropic offers for hard tasks
- →You run long, complex autonomous agents where quality compounds over many steps
- →You do frontier-level engineering, research, or analytics and cost is secondary
- →You want maximum accuracy on the toughest coding and reasoning benchmarks
Choose Qwen 3 if...
- →You need an open, self-hostable model with a permissive license
- →You want to toggle deep reasoning on or off per request
- →Multilingual applications
- →Efficient inference via MoE with few active parameters