Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 and Alibaba / Qwen's Qwen3 235B-A22B.
| Metric | Claude Sonnet 5 | Qwen3 235B-A22B | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | Anthropic | Alibaba / Qwen | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $2.00 | $0.455 | Qwen3 235B-A22B (77% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.20 | $0.18 | Qwen3 235B-A22B lower |
| Output / 1M | $10.00 | $1.82 | Qwen3 235B-A22B lower |
| Context Window | 1M | 128k | Claude Sonnet 5 (1M) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 16.4k | 32k | Qwen3 235B-A22B |
| Tokenizer Family | Anthropic Claude BPE (~65k vocabulary) | Qwen SentencePiece BPE (152k vocabulary) | — |
| Workload (per month) | Claude Sonnet 5 | Qwen3 235B-A22B |
|---|---|---|
| Chatbot10k requests · 500 in / 200 out | $30.00 | $5.915 |
| RAG app100k requests · 8,000 in / 1,200 out | $2,800.00 | $582.40 |
| Coding agent100k requests · 12,000 in / 2,000 out | $4,400.00 | $910.00 |
Standard rates, no caching or batch discounts. Model your own numbers below.
Opt for Claude Sonnet 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 $2/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.
At a typical 3:1 input-to-output token mix, Qwen3 235B-A22B is about 80% cheaper than Claude Sonnet 5. Claude Sonnet 5 costs $2 per 1M input and $10 per 1M output tokens; Qwen3 235B-A22B costs $0.455 and $1.82.
Claude Sonnet 5 has the larger context window: 1M tokens vs 128k.
Claude Sonnet 5: yes, cached input costs $0.2/1M. Qwen3 235B-A22B: yes, cached input costs $0.18/1M.