Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Qwen 3
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Haiku 4.5 is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (74 vs 30 on our capability index).
- •Qwen 3 is meaningfully stronger at math (80 vs 68).
- •Qwen 3 is open-weights (free to self-host); Claude Haiku 4.5 is paid API only.
Specs comparison
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | Qwen 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Alibaba (Qwen Team) |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | ✓200K | 128K tokens (32K for 0.6B/1.7B/4B dense variants) |
| Input / 1M tokens | $1.00 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $5.00 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2025-10 | 2025-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Haiku 4.5 | Qwen 3 |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 73.3% | - |
| GPQA | 64.6% | - |
| MMLU Pro | 80.0% | - |
| 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 Haiku 4.5 if...
- →You need high throughput and low latency at minimal cost
- →You are fanning out many parallel sub-agents or worker calls
- →You want solid coding/computer-use quality without Opus/Sonnet pricing
- →Your task fits comfortably within a 200K context window
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