Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between Alibaba / Qwen's Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct — Together AI and Alibaba / Qwen's Qwen3 235B-A22B.
• Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct — Together AI: Classified as a Legacy Reference model (Deprecated on Together AI (Reference)).
| Metric | Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct — Together AI | Qwen3 235B-A22B | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | Alibaba / Qwen | Alibaba / Qwen | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $0.35 | $0.90 | Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct — Together AI (61% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.175 | $0.18 | Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct — Together AI lower |
| Output / 1M | $0.40 | $1.60 | Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct — Together AI lower |
| Context Window | 128k | 128k | Equal |
| Max Generation Tokens | 8.2k | 32k | Qwen3 235B-A22B |
| Tokenizer Family | Qwen Byte-level BPE (~152k vocabulary) | Qwen SentencePiece BPE (152k vocabulary) | — |
Opt for Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct — Together AI when your engineering requirements prioritize Alibaba / Qwen's ecosystem, specific tokenizer efficiencies (Calibrated Qwen Tokenizer (±3%)), or when your expected prompt-to-completion ratios favor its $0.35/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.