Claude Opus 4.5 vs Qwen2.5-Max
Anthropic vs Qwen · Prices checked 12 August 2026
There is a 10.9× price gap here. Qwen2.5-Max blends to $3.04 per million tokens; Claude Opus 4.5 to $33.00. A single 100K-input, 10K-output job costs $0.224 on Qwen2.5-Max against $2.25 on Claude Opus 4.5.
Capability favours Claude Opus 4.5, ahead on 4 of 5 suites they both publish. The widest gap is on LMArena Elo, where Claude Opus 4.5 leads by 70 points. 1 suite tied. Claude Opus 4.5 reads more in one request: 200,000 tokens of context against 32,000. Claude Opus 4.5 was released Sep 2025; Qwen2.5-Max Jan 2025.
Pricing and capacity
| Metric | Claude Opus 4.5 | Qwen2.5-Max | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Input / 1M tokens | $15.00 | $1.60 | 9.4× |
| Output / 1M tokens | $75.00 | $6.40 | 11.7× |
| Blended · 70/30calculated | $33.00 | $3.04 | 10.9× |
| Blended · 50/50calculated | $45.00 | $4.00 | 11.3× |
| Blended · 80/20calculated | $27.00 | $2.56 | 10.5× |
| Blended · 20/80calculated | $63.00 | $5.44 | 11.6× |
| Job cost · 100K + 10Kcalculated | $2.25 | $0.224 | 10.0× |
| Job cost · 1M + 100Kcalculated | $22.50 | $2.24 | 10.0× |
| Context window | 200,000 | 32,000 | 6.3× |
Input and output rates are as published by each provider. Blended and job-cost rows are calculated comparison metrics, not published prices — how they are derived.
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.5 | Qwen2.5-Max | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| MMLU | 87% | 87% | Level |
| GPQA Diamond | 76% | 60% | Claude Opus 4.5 |
| MATH | 88% | 85% | Claude Opus 4.5 |
| HumanEval | 93% | 90% | Claude Opus 4.5 |
| LMArena Elo | 1366 Elo | 1296 Elo | Claude Opus 4.5 |
Only suites both models report are listed, so a missing score is never shown as a loss. Figures are provider-published or from public leaderboards and are not independently re-run.
What each model is for
Claude Opus 4.5
Anthropic · Previous
Direct predecessor to Opus 4.6. Strong choice when you need Claude 4 behaviour without changing existing prompts and evals tuned to the 4.5 generation.
- 1M-token context
- Stable for production pipelines
- Strong agentic coding
- Tool use & function calling
Qwen2.5-Max
Qwen · Flagship
Alibaba's closed-weights flagship. Frontier-quality MoE that competes with Claude / GPT on Chinese benchmarks at competitive pricing.
- Frontier on Chinese benchmarks
- MoE inference economics
- Strong tool use
- Multilingual
Frequently asked questions
Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.5 or Qwen2.5-Max?
There is a 10.9× price gap here. Qwen2.5-Max blends to $3.04 per million tokens; Claude Opus 4.5 to $33.00. A single 100K-input, 10K-output job costs $0.224 on Qwen2.5-Max against $2.25 on Claude Opus 4.5. Blended cost weights input at 70% and output at 30%; price your own token split for an exact answer, since the cheaper model on a blended basis is not always cheaper for your workload.
Which performs better, Claude Opus 4.5 or Qwen2.5-Max?
Capability favours Claude Opus 4.5, ahead on 4 of 5 suites they both publish. The widest gap is on LMArena Elo, where Claude Opus 4.5 leads by 70 points. 1 suite tied. These are the figures each provider or public leaderboard publishes, not results we re-run, and a benchmark average can hide the specific behaviour your workload depends on.
Which has the larger context window, Claude Opus 4.5 or Qwen2.5-Max?
Claude Opus 4.5 reads more in one request: 200,000 tokens of context against 32,000. The context window caps everything in a single request: prompt, retrieved documents, conversation history and the model’s own output all share it.
Can I compare Claude Opus 4.5 and Qwen2.5-Max on my own numbers?
Yes. Open both in the side-by-side comparison tool to see every field at once, or use the token calculator to price your actual prompt and monthly request volume against each model. Both are free and need no sign-up.
Price it for your own workload
Related matchups
Terms used on this page
Prices and scores are recomputed on every deploy from the catalogue. Prices checked 12 August 2026.