Claude Opus 4.8 vs Qwen 3
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Opus 4.8 is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (88 vs 30 on our capability index).
- •Qwen 3 is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (90 vs 70).
- •Qwen 3 is open-weights (free to self-host); Claude Opus 4.8 is paid API only.
- •Claude Opus 4.8 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 Opus 4.8 | 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 | $5.00 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $25.00 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2026-05 | 2025-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Qwen 3 |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 88.6% | - |
| SWE-bench Pro | 69.2% | - |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | 74.6% | - |
| GPQA Diamond | 93.6% | - |
| Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index | 61.4 | - |
| 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 Opus 4.8 if...
- →You need top-tier autonomous coding and multi-step agentic reliability
- →You run long-horizon agent traces that previously derailed after compaction
- →You want enterprise-grade reasoning with 1M context and 128k output
- →You need throughput and are willing to pay fast-mode premium for 2.5x speed
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