Claude Code vs Qwen Code: Which AI Agent Is Better?
An in-depth comparison of Claude Code and Qwen Code across output quality, autonomy, reliability, speed, value, and ease of use. Vote for your favorite.
An in-depth comparison of Claude Code and Qwen Code across output quality, autonomy, reliability, speed, value, and ease of use. Vote for your favorite.
Either way, you pay for the model calls. A median coding-agent day on our gateway is 95 requests and 8.6 million tokens. The table prices every step at one model’s rate.
Both run on Standard Compute, where each step goes to the cheapest model that can do it: routine steps go to efficient open models, hard ones to frontier models such as Claude Fable 5.1 or GPT-6 Astra.
| Model | Typical day | Busy day |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus 5.5 | $7.34 | $59.10 |
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | $3.67 | $29.55 |
| GPT-6 Luna | $0.23 | $2.43 |
Fixed monthly plans from $19. Eligible new accounts can try $0.25 of compute first, no card. Trial terms
Pick a winner in each category. You can change your vote anytime.
Claude CodeQwen CodeChoose Claude Code if you are developers who want the strongest end-to-end coding agent, in the terminal or IDE. Choose Qwen Code if you are developers who want a free, Claude Code-style terminal agent that runs Qwen models next to any other provider.
In our editorial scoring, Claude Code leads in 4 of six categories (output quality, autonomy, reliability and ease of use), while Qwen Code leads in 1 (value). On price, Claude Code runs included with claude pro/max / api and is proprietary; Qwen Code runs free (apache 2.0), bring your own provider and is open source.
What it costs to run Claude Code or Qwen Code
Best API for Claude Code →
4 options compared, with prices and limits
Best API for Qwen Code →
4 options compared, with prices and limits
Standard Compute sends each step to the cheapest model that can do it, on providers we vet for price, uptime and speed. Plans start at $19 a month, and eligible new accounts can try $0.25 of compute with no card. Choose your agent below to connect.
See the trial and activation steps →
More on Claude Code: Claude Code pricing 2026: how much does Claude Code cost? · How do I use Portkey with Claude Code?
Claude Code is Anthropic's agentic coding tool. It searches and understands your codebase, plans multi-step changes, edits files, runs tests and shell commands, and works through git workflows including commits and pull requests. Widely regarded as the quality benchmark among terminal coding agents, it's extensible through MCP servers, hooks, and subagents, and also ships as IDE extensions and a desktop app.
Qwen Code is Alibaba's Qwen team's open-source coding agent. It was originally based on Gemini CLI v0.8.2, stopped syncing with upstream at v0.1 and has been developed on its own since, with frequent releases (v0.25.2 on October 15, 2026). It ships subagents, agent teams, skills, hooks, MCP, plan mode, LSP and git worktrees, plus VS Code, JetBrains and Zed plugins, a desktop app and Telegram, DingTalk, WeChat and Feishu channels. Unlike Gemini CLI it speaks the OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini APIs, so any compatible provider works through modelProviders in ~/.qwen/settings.json. The free Qwen OAuth tier ended on April 15, 2026: the tool is still free, and the models come from Alibaba's Coding Plan or Token Plan, a built-in third-party provider, a local model or a custom provider.
Claude Code and Qwen Code both run on Standard Compute
