Standard Compute
Model comparison 2026

Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs Qwen3 235B A22B

Claude Sonnet 5.5
Anthropic · Balanced · Proprietary
$4.40/1M · 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
Sonnet 5.5
Qwen3 235B
Maker
Anthropic
Alibaba (Qwen)
Blended price / 1M
$4.40
$0.23
Input / output
$2.00 in · $10 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
9.8
8.0
Agentic Ability
9.8
8.0
Speed
8.4
8.2
Value for money
8.8
10.0
Reliability
9.4
8.8

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

Verdict: Sonnet 5.5 or Qwen3 235B?

Updated 2026-10-13

Choose Claude Sonnet 5.5 if you want the everyday default for coding agents, escalating to Opus 5.5 only for the hardest tasks. Choose Qwen3 235B A22B if you want self-hosted or ultra-cheap open-weight agents.

In our editorial scoring, Claude Sonnet 5.5 leads in 4 of five dimensions (output quality, agentic ability, speed and reliability), while Qwen3 235B A22B leads in 1. On price, Claude Sonnet 5.5 runs about $4.40 per 1M tokens (blended) and is proprietary; Qwen3 235B A22B is about $0.23 and open-weight.

Where Sonnet 5.5 falls short
  • Artificial Analysis flags it as very verbose, which adds output tokens
  • Released September 2026, so its long-run track record is still short
Full Sonnet 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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