Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between Cohere's Command R (08-2024) and Alibaba / Qwen's Qwen3 235B-A22B.
• Command R (08-2024): Classified as a Legacy Reference model (Tracked Production / Legacy Family).
| Metric | Command R (08-2024) | Qwen3 235B-A22B | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | Cohere | Alibaba / Qwen | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $0.15 | $0.90 | Command R (08-2024) (83% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.015 | $0.18 | Command R (08-2024) lower |
| Output / 1M | $0.60 | $1.60 | Command R (08-2024) lower |
| Context Window | 128k | 128k | Qwen3 235B-A22B (128k) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 4.1k | 32k | Qwen3 235B-A22B |
| Tokenizer Family | Cohere BPE (~256k vocabulary) | Qwen SentencePiece BPE (152k vocabulary) | — |
Opt for Command R (08-2024) when your engineering requirements prioritize Cohere's ecosystem, specific tokenizer efficiencies (Calibrated Cohere Tokenizer (±3%)), or when your expected prompt-to-completion ratios favor its $0.15/M input rate.
Opt for Qwen3 235B-A22B when looking for Alibaba / Qwen's tooling integration, specific context window depth (128k tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $1.6/M rate.