Command R+ vs Qwen 3
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Qwen 3 is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (90 vs 60).
- •Qwen 3 is open-weights (free to self-host); Command R+ is paid API only.
Specs comparison
| Command R+ | Qwen 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Cohere | Alibaba (Qwen Team) |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | 128K tokens | 128K tokens (32K for 0.6B/1.7B/4B dense variants) |
| Input / 1M tokens | $2.50 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $10.00 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2024-08 | 2025-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Command R+ | Qwen 3 |
|---|---|---|
| RAG (BEIR) | Top-5 | - |
| MMLU | ~75% | - |
| 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 Command R+ if...
- →Your core use case is grounded RAG with citations
- →You need reliable multi-step tool/agent orchestration
- →You want an enterprise model available on Bedrock
- →You need multilingual responses across the 10 optimized languages
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