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o4-mini 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 $1.10/$4.40. o4-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1380 vs 1250. Qwen 2.5 Max is faster at 80 tokens/sec vs 60 tokens/sec. o4-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1350 vs 1260. o4-mini offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

Featureo4-miniQwen 2.5 Max
ProviderOpenAIAlibaba
Input Price / 1M tokens$1.10$0.160
Output Price / 1M tokens$4.40$0.640
Context Window200K128K
Max Output Tokens100,0008,192
Arena ELO1,3501,260
Coding ELO1,3801,250
TTFT (ms)1,200240
Tokens/sec6080
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesNo
When to Use o4-mini

Choose o4-mini when you need: excellent reasoning and math capabilities, strong coding performance, affordable for a reasoning model, large output window. It excels at reasoning, math, coding, science tasks. Its 200K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • Excellent reasoning and math capabilities
  • Strong coding performance
  • Affordable for a reasoning model
  • Large output window

Best for:

reasoningmathcodingscience
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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