// head_to_head
Claude Opus 5.5 vs Qwen3 Coder Flash
Published LiveBench scores across all seven categories, live list pricing, context windows, and the measured cost of a point of capability — for both models, side by side.
Qwen3 Coder Flash is the cheaper of the two; neither can be ranked on quality here.
Qwen3 Coder Flash does not have a published LiveBench run, so this comparison covers price, context and declared capabilities only. A missing score means "not evaluated", not "worse" — the right way to separate these two is an eval on your own workload.
anthropic
Claude Opus 5.5
- Blended / 1M
- $8.00
- Context
- 1M
- Released
- Sep 22, 2026
- Overall score
- 83.2
qwen
Qwen3 Coder Flash
- Blended / 1M
- $0.390
- Context
- 1M
- Released
- Sep 17, 2025
- Overall score
- Not evaluated
Specs and pricing
| Metric | Claude Opus 5.5 | Qwen3 Coder Flash |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 83.2 | — |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $0.4474 | — |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $8.00 | $0.390win |
| Input price / 1M | $4.00 | $0.195win |
| Output price / 1M | $20.00 | $0.975win |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.200 | $0.039win |
| Context window | 1M | 1M |
| Max output tokens | 128Kwin | 66K |
Benchmarks by category
An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — Claude Opus 5.5 on top, Qwen3 Coder Flash below, both out of 100.
What each one costs to run
Per-token prices are hard to feel. These are monthly list costs for both models across five workload shapes, using each provider's published cached-input rate where there is one.
| Workload | Claude Opus 5.5 | Qwen3 Coder Flash |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $2,286/mo | $113.57/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $2,880/mo | $152.10/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $2,672/mo | $146.64/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $5,310/mo | $260.32/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $10,100/mo | $507.00/mo |
Which should you pick?
You are cost-constrained
Qwen3 Coder Flash
Cheaper on blended list price at $0.390 per million tokens.
Claude Opus 5.5 vs Qwen3 Coder Flash FAQ
Which is better, Claude Opus 5.5 or Qwen3 Coder Flash?
Qwen3 Coder Flash is the cheaper of the two; neither can be ranked on quality here. Qwen3 Coder Flash does not have a published LiveBench run, so this comparison covers price, context and declared capabilities only. A missing score means "not evaluated", not "worse" — the right way to separate these two is an eval on your own workload.
Is Claude Opus 5.5 cheaper than Qwen3 Coder Flash?
Qwen3 Coder Flash is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, Claude Opus 5.5 lists at $8.00 per million tokens and Qwen3 Coder Flash at $0.390 — Qwen3 Coder Flash is 21× cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — Claude Opus 5.5 charges $4.00 in and $20.00 out, Qwen3 Coder Flash charges $0.195 and $0.975 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.
Does Claude Opus 5.5 or Qwen3 Coder Flash have a bigger context window?
They are effectively the same — 1M for Claude Opus 5.5 and 1M for Qwen3 Coder Flash.
Do Claude Opus 5.5 and Qwen3 Coder Flash support prompt caching?
Both publish a cached-input rate: $0.200 per million for Claude Opus 5.5 and $0.039 for Qwen3 Coder Flash, against full input rates of $4.00 and $0.195. On a workload with a long stable prefix — a system prompt, a tool schema, a retrieved corpus — that changes the economics more than the headline price does.
Related comparisons
How these numbers are produced
- Price — provider list price from OpenRouter, refreshed every 15 minutes. “Blended” is a 3:1 input:output mix.
- Scores — LiveBench release 2026-06-25, using their own category map. Each model shows its strongest published run. A blank means “not evaluated”, never “bad”.
- Cost per point — the measured dollars LiveBench spent on the run, divided by the score it earned.
- “Win” — awarded only past a threshold: one full point on a benchmark score, 10% on a price, 25% on a context window. Anything tighter reports as a tie, because effort settings alone move a LiveBench score by more than that.
Published benchmarks rank models on someone else's tasks. Before committing, see LLM & agent evaluation for building an eval on your own.