Claude Sonnet 5 vs Qwen 3
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Sonnet 5 is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (85 vs 30 on our capability index).
- •Qwen 3 is open-weights (free to self-host); Claude Sonnet 5 is paid API only.
- •Claude Sonnet 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 Sonnet 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 | $3.00 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $15.00 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2026-06 | 2025-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 5 | Qwen 3 |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | ~85.2% | - |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | 80.4% | - |
| SWE-bench Pro | 63.2% | - |
| OSWorld-Verified | 81.2% | - |
| 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 Sonnet 5 if...
- →You want frontier-adjacent agentic coding but need better cost-efficiency than Opus
- →You are running high-volume agent loops and want strong reasoning per dollar
- →You are already on Sonnet 4.6 and want a same-price capability upgrade
- →You need a 1M context window with fast latency
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