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 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.
GPT-5
OpenAIOpenAI'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.
Specs Comparison
| Specification | Qwen 3.5 | GPT-5 |
|---|---|---|
| Context Window | 262K | 400K |
| Max Output | 32K | 128K |
| Input (per 1M tokens) | $0.39 | $1.25 |
| Output (per 1M tokens) | $1.56 | $10.00 |
| Reasoning | ||
| Open Source |
Scenario Score Comparison
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.
Get Started with Qwen 3.5
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💡 Free tier has limited GPT-5 access.
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