Qwen 3.5 vs GPT-5

Comprehensive comparison between Alibaba (Qwen)'s Qwen 3.5 and OpenAI's GPT-5. Compare pricing, performance, features, and user reviews.

qwen vs gptalibaba ai vs openai

Qwen 3.5

Alibaba (Qwen)

Alibaba's flagship open-source MoE model with 397B total parameters (17B active per pass). Apache 2.0 licensed for commercial use. Supports 201 languages with native vision capabilities. Best open-weight model for local deployment.

$0.39/$1.56per M tokens
Details

GPT-5

OpenAI

OpenAI's unified flagship model with built-in routing system that auto-selects optimal sub-models. HN users praise its comprehensive multimodal capabilities and competitive pricing ($1.25 vs Claude $15). However, benchmark chart errors at launch sparked controversy.

$1.25/$10per M tokens
Details

Specs Comparison

SpecificationQwen 3.5GPT-5
Context Window262K400K
Max Output32K128K
Input (per 1M tokens)$0.39$1.25
Output (per 1M tokens)$1.56$10.00
Reasoning
Open Source

Scenario Score Comparison

Coding
87
vs
86
Writing
82
vs
92
Translation
—
vs
93
Data Analysis
—
vs
91
Conversation
—
vs
94
Image Gen
—
vs
90
Research
—
vs
89
App Building
—
vs
88

Qwen 3.5

Pros

  • + Open source (Apache 2.0)
  • + Self-hostable with vLLM
  • + 201 language support
  • + MoE efficiency (17B active)
  • + Cheapest API among frontier-class
  • + Strong vision/multimodal performance

Cons

  • − Weaker on hard coding tasks vs Opus/GPT
  • − Requires significant VRAM for local hosting
  • − Quantization affects complex reasoning
  • − Smaller context than GPT-5.4/Opus 4.6

GPT-5

Pros

  • + Highly competitive pricing
  • + Most comprehensive multimodal
  • + DALL-E integration
  • + Largest ecosystem

Cons

  • − Coding inferior to Claude Opus
  • − Launch quality issues
  • − Black-box architecture

Recommendation

Choose Qwen 3.5 if you:

  • • Need open source (apache 2.0)
  • • Need self-hostable with vllm
  • • Need 201 language support

Choose GPT-5 if you:

  • • Need highly competitive pricing
  • • Need most comprehensive multimodal
  • • Need dall-e integration

Based on scores across 8 scenarios, GPT-5 performs better overall.

Qwen 3.5 Details GPT-5 Details

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