# Qwen 3.5 vs Claude Sonnet 5

On provider list prices, Qwen 3.5 costs $0.60 per million input tokens against $3 for Claude Sonnet 5: 5.0x apart. Output is $3.60 against $15 (4.2x).

## Specifications

| | Qwen 3.5 | Claude Sonnet 5 |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Lab | Qwen | Anthropic |
| Access | Open weights | API only |
| Context window | 256K tokens | 1M tokens |
| List price, input | $0.60 / M tokens | $3 / M tokens |
| List price, output | $3.60 / M tokens | $15 / M tokens |
| Cached input | $0.35 / M tokens | n/a |
| License | Apache 2.0 | Proprietary API |
| Fine-tunable | Yes | No |

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 $8,850 on Claude Sonnet 5 at list: a gap of $6,870, or 4.5x.

Claude Sonnet 5 reads 1M tokens per request against 256K for Qwen 3.5, 3.8x the window. That decides which one can take whole documents without splitting them.

## Choose Qwen 3.5 for

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

## Choose Claude Sonnet 5 for

- Judgment calls with policy context
- Customer-facing writing
- Review and escalation flows

## Common questions

### Which is cheaper, Qwen 3.5 or Claude Sonnet 5?

Qwen 3.5, on this workload shape. At list prices it is $0.60/$3.60 per million tokens in and out against $3/$15 for Claude Sonnet 5. Billed on Allocate: $0.64/$3.85 against $3.21/$16.05.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Claude Sonnet 5: 1,000,000 tokens (1M) against 262,144 (256K) for Qwen 3.5.

### Can I fine-tune Qwen 3.5 or Claude Sonnet 5?

Qwen 3.5 publishes open weights (Apache 2.0) and can be fine-tuned on your own data. Claude Sonnet 5 is a closed model served over API; its weights are not available.

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