Standard Compute
Model comparison 2026

Claude Opus 5.5 vs Qwen3 235B A22B

Claude Opus 5.5
Anthropic · Frontier · Proprietary
$8.80/1M · 1M ctx
Qwen3 235B A22B
Alibaba (Qwen) · Budget · Open weights
$0.23/1M · 262K ctx

Community vote

Pick a winner in each dimension. You can change your vote any time.

Output Quality
Correctness and depth of what it produces
Agentic Ability
Tool calls, instruction-following, and multi-step tasks
Speed
Tokens per second and time-to-first-token
Value for money
How much capability you get per dollar
Reliability
Consistent results: fewer refusals, loops and format breaks

Specs and pricing side by side

Spec
Opus 5.5
Qwen3 235B
Maker
Anthropic
Alibaba (Qwen)
Blended price / 1M
$8.80
$0.23
Input / output
$4.00 in · $20 out / 1M tokens
$0.09 in · $0.55 out / 1M tokens
Context window
1M
262K
Open weights
No
Yes
Tool use
Yes
Yes
Reasoning
Yes
No
Output Quality
10.0
8.0
Agentic Ability
10.0
8.0
Speed
7.6
8.2
Value for money
7.4
10.0
Reliability
9.5
8.8

Pricing and capabilities synced from the OpenRouter catalogue. Scores are editorial (0–10).

Verdict: Opus 5.5 or Qwen3 235B?

Updated 2026-10-13

Choose Claude Opus 5.5 if you want the hardest coding and agent work, as the default flagship instead of Fable. Choose Qwen3 235B A22B if you want self-hosted or ultra-cheap open-weight agents.

In our editorial scoring, Claude Opus 5.5 leads in 3 of five dimensions (output quality, agentic ability and reliability), while Qwen3 235B A22B leads in 2. On price, Claude Opus 5.5 runs about $8.80 per 1M tokens (blended) and is proprietary; Qwen3 235B A22B is about $0.23 and open-weight.

Where Opus 5.5 falls short
  • Twice Sonnet 5.5's price per token for a small measured gain
  • Released September 2026, so its long-run track record is still short
Full Opus 5.5 breakdown →
Where Qwen3 235B falls short
  • Behind frontier models on quality
  • Needs real GPUs to self-host well
Full Qwen3 235B breakdown →

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Current frontier models Claude Opus 5.5 · Claude Sonnet 5.5

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