Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 and Alibaba / Qwen's Qwen3 235B-A22B.
| Metric | Claude Opus 5 | Qwen3 235B-A22B | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | Anthropic | Alibaba / Qwen | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $5.00 | $0.455 | Qwen3 235B-A22B (91% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.50 | $0.18 | Qwen3 235B-A22B lower |
| Output / 1M | $25.00 | $1.82 | Qwen3 235B-A22B lower |
| Context Window | 1M | 128k | Claude Opus 5 (1M) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 16.4k | 32k | Qwen3 235B-A22B |
| Tokenizer Family | Anthropic Claude BPE (~65k vocabulary) | Qwen SentencePiece BPE (152k vocabulary) | — |
Opt for Claude Opus 5 when your engineering requirements prioritize Anthropic's ecosystem, specific tokenizer efficiencies (Calibrated Claude Tokenizer (±3%)), or when your expected prompt-to-completion ratios favor its $5/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 $1.82/M rate.