LV
LLMversus

Claude Opus 4 vs Qwen 2.5 Max: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Qwen 2.5 Max is significantly cheaper at $0.16/$0.64 per million tokens vs $15.00/$75.00. Claude Opus 4 is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1360 vs 1250. Qwen 2.5 Max is faster at 80 tokens/sec vs 50 tokens/sec. Claude Opus 4 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1330 vs 1260. Claude Opus 4 offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureClaude Opus 4Qwen 2.5 Max
ProviderAnthropicAlibaba
Input Price / 1M tokens$15.00$0.160
Output Price / 1M tokens$75.00$0.640
Context Window200K128K
Max Output Tokens32,0008,192
Arena ELO1,3301,260
Coding ELO1,3601,250
TTFT (ms)500240
Tokens/sec5080
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesNo
When to Use Claude Opus 4

Choose Claude Opus 4 when you need: top-tier coding and reasoning, excellent agentic capabilities, strong instruction following, 200k context window. It excels at coding, analysis, agents, complex-reasoning tasks. Its 200K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • Top-tier coding and reasoning
  • Excellent agentic capabilities
  • Strong instruction following
  • 200K context window

Best for:

codinganalysisagentscomplex-reasoning
When to Use Qwen 2.5 Max

Choose Qwen 2.5 Max when you need: extremely competitive pricing, strong coding and general capabilities, open-source model available, good multilingual support including chinese. It excels at coding, general-purpose, cost-sensitive, open-source tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

Strengths:

  • Extremely competitive pricing
  • Strong coding and general capabilities
  • Open-source model available
  • Good multilingual support including Chinese

Best for:

codinggeneral-purposecost-sensitiveopen-source

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Comparisons

Claude Opus 4 vs O4 MiniO4 Mini vs Qwen 2.5 MaxClaude Opus 4 vs Gemini 2 5 ProGemini 2 5 Pro vs Qwen 2.5 MaxClaude Opus 4 vs Deepseek R1Claude Opus 4 vs O3 MiniClaude Opus 4 vs Grok 3Claude Opus 4 vs Gpt 4 1Claude Opus 4 vs Llama 4 MaverickClaude Opus 4 vs Claude Sonnet 4Claude Opus 4 vs Deepseek V3Claude Opus 4 vs Gemini 2 0 FlashClaude Opus 4 vs Gpt 4oClaude Opus 4 vs Llama 4 ScoutClaude Opus 4 vs Mistral LargeClaude Opus 4 vs Gpt 4 1 MiniClaude Haiku 4 vs Claude Opus 4Claude Opus 4 vs Gpt 4o MiniClaude Opus 4 vs Grok 3 MiniClaude Opus 4 vs Command R Plus