Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between OpenAI's OpenAI o4-mini and Alibaba / Qwen's Qwen3 235B-A22B.
| Metric | OpenAI o4-mini | Qwen3 235B-A22B | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | OpenAI | Alibaba / Qwen | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $1.10 | $0.90 | Qwen3 235B-A22B (18% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.275 | $0.18 | Qwen3 235B-A22B lower |
| Output / 1M | $4.40 | $1.60 | Qwen3 235B-A22B lower |
| Context Window | 200k | 128k | OpenAI o4-mini (200k) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 64k | 32k | OpenAI o4-mini |
| Tokenizer Family | OpenAI o200k_base (200k vocabulary) | Qwen SentencePiece BPE (152k vocabulary) | — |
Opt for OpenAI o4-mini when your engineering requirements prioritize OpenAI's ecosystem, specific tokenizer efficiencies (Exact BPE (o200k_base)), or when your expected prompt-to-completion ratios favor its $1.1/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.