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Grok 3 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 $3.00/$15.00. Grok 3 is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1290 vs 1250. Grok 3 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1300 vs 1260.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureGrok 3Qwen 2.5 Max
ProviderxAIAlibaba
Input Price / 1M tokens$3.00$0.160
Output Price / 1M tokens$15.00$0.640
Context Window128K128K
Max Output Tokens16,3848,192
Arena ELO1,3001,260
Coding ELO1,2901,250
TTFT (ms)300240
Tokens/sec8080
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesNo
When to Use Grok 3

Choose Grok 3 when you need: strong benchmark performance, good reasoning capabilities, vision and multimodal support, fast for its capability tier. It excels at general-purpose, reasoning, coding tasks.

Strengths:

  • Strong benchmark performance
  • Good reasoning capabilities
  • Vision and multimodal support
  • Fast for its capability tier

Best for:

general-purposereasoningcoding
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

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