# Claude Opus 4.8 vs Qwen 3.5

On provider list prices, Qwen 3.5 costs $0.60 per million input tokens against $5 for Claude Opus 4.8: 8.3x apart. Output is $3.60 against $25 (6.9x).

## Specifications

| | Claude Opus 4.8 | Qwen 3.5 |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Lab | Anthropic | Qwen |
| Access | API only | Open weights |
| Context window | 200K tokens | 256K tokens |
| List price, input | $5 / M tokens | $0.60 / M tokens |
| List price, output | $25 / M tokens | $3.60 / M tokens |
| Cached input | n/a | $0.35 / M tokens |
| License | Proprietary API | Apache 2.0 |
| Fine-tunable | No | Yes |

Specifications and provider list prices from the Allocate catalog, checked 2026-07-21.

## What the numbers say

Take 1,000,000 requests a month at 1,200 input and 350 output tokens each. That workload costs $1,980 a month on Qwen 3.5 and $14,750 on Claude Opus 4.8 at list: a gap of $12,770, or 7.4x.

Qwen 3.5 reads 256K tokens per request against 200K for Claude Opus 4.8, 1.3x the window. That decides which one can take whole documents without splitting them.

## Choose Claude Opus 4.8 for

- Hardest reasoning problems
- High-stakes analysis
- Escalation tier for agents

## Choose Qwen 3.5 for

- Multilingual support agents
- Translation-adjacent workflows
- Fine-tuning under Apache 2.0

## Common questions

### Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.8 or Qwen 3.5?

Qwen 3.5, on this workload shape. At list prices it is $0.60/$3.60 per million tokens in and out against $5/$25 for Claude Opus 4.8. Billed on Allocate: $0.64/$3.85 against $5.35/$26.75.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Qwen 3.5: 262,144 tokens (256K) against 200,000 (200K) for Claude Opus 4.8.

### Can I fine-tune Claude Opus 4.8 or Qwen 3.5?

Qwen 3.5 publishes open weights (Apache 2.0) and can be fine-tuned on your own data. Claude Opus 4.8 is a closed model served over API; its weights are not available.

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[HTML page](https://allocate.network/compare/opus-4-8-vs-qwen-3-5) · [Claude Opus 4.8](https://allocate.network/models/opus-4-8.md) · [Qwen 3.5](https://allocate.network/models/qwen-3-5.md) · [Machine-readable catalog](https://allocate.network/catalog.json)