GPT-5 vs Qwen 3
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •GPT-5 is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (83 vs 30 on our capability index).
- •Qwen 3 is meaningfully stronger at speed (78 vs 68).
- •Qwen 3 is open-weights (free to self-host); GPT-5 is paid API only.
- •Qwen 3 has a 128K tokens (32K for 0.6B/1.7B/4B dense variants) context window vs 400,000 tokens (128,000 max output) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| GPT-5 | Qwen 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | Alibaba (Qwen Team) |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | 400,000 tokens (128,000 max output) | ✓128K tokens (32K for 0.6B/1.7B/4B dense variants) |
| Input / 1M tokens | $1.25 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $10.00 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2025-08 | 2025-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | GPT-5 | Qwen 3 |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 74.9% | - |
| AIME 2025 | 94.6% | - |
| GPQA (GPT-5 pro) | 88.4% | - |
| 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 GPT-5 if...
- →You want strong reasoning at the lowest frontier-model price
- →Existing GPT-5-based systems that are already tuned and validated
- →General coding, math, and reasoning workloads on a budget
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