GPT-4o vs Qwen 3
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •GPT-4o is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (80 vs 30 on our capability index).
- •Qwen 3 is meaningfully stronger at long context (80 vs 55).
- •Qwen 3 is open-weights (free to self-host); GPT-4o is paid API only.
- •Qwen 3 has a 128K tokens (32K for 0.6B/1.7B/4B dense variants) context window vs 128,000 tokens (16,384 max output) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| GPT-4o | Qwen 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | Alibaba (Qwen Team) |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | 128,000 tokens (16,384 max output) | ✓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 | 2024-05 | 2025-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | GPT-4o | Qwen 3 |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU | 88.7% | - |
| HumanEval | 90.2% | - |
| MATH | 76.6% | - |
| 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 GPT-4o if...
- →Everyday assistant, drafting, summarization, and classification tasks
- →Latency- and cost-sensitive applications at scale
- →Multimodal tasks needing image understanding with fast responses
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