// head_to_head
Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking
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 VL 30B A3B Thinking is the cheaper of the two; neither can be ranked on quality here.
Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking 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 Sonnet 5.5
- Blended / 1M
- $4.00
- Context
- 1M
- Released
- Sep 28, 2026
- Overall score
- 80.0
qwen
Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking
- Blended / 1M
- $0.467
- Context
- 262K
- Released
- Oct 6, 2025
- Overall score
- Not evaluated
Specs and pricing
| Metric | Claude Sonnet 5.5 | Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Weighted mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 80.0 | — |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $0.0372 | — |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $4.00 | $0.467win |
| Input price / 1M | $2.00 | $0.290win |
| Output price / 1M | $10.00 | $1.00win |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.100 | — |
| Context window | 1Mwin | 262K |
| Max output tokens | 128K | 236Kwin |
Benchmarks by category
An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — Claude Sonnet 5.5 on top, Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking 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 Sonnet 5.5 | Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $1,143/mo | $149.60/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $1,440/mo | $292.00/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $1,336/mo | $312.00/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $2,655/mo | $365.00/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $5,050/mo | $825.00/mo |
Which should you pick?
You need to fit large documents in one call
Claude Sonnet 5.5
Wider context window — 1M against 262K.
You are cost-constrained
Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking
Cheaper on blended list price at $0.467 per million tokens.
Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking FAQ
Which is better, Claude Sonnet 5.5 or Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking?
Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking is the cheaper of the two; neither can be ranked on quality here. Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking 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 Sonnet 5.5 cheaper than Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking?
Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, Claude Sonnet 5.5 lists at $4.00 per million tokens and Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking at $0.467 — Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking is 8.6× cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — Claude Sonnet 5.5 charges $2.00 in and $10.00 out, Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking charges $0.290 and $1.00 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.
Does Claude Sonnet 5.5 or Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking have a bigger context window?
Claude Sonnet 5.5 has the larger context window: 1M for Claude Sonnet 5.5 against 262K for Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking. Note that a window you can fill is not a window you should fill — retrieval quality usually degrades well before the limit, and you pay for every token you put in it.
Do Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking support prompt caching?
Claude Sonnet 5.5 publishes a cached-input rate of $0.100 per million tokens against a full input rate of $2.00. The catalogue lists no separate cached rate for Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking, which means the provider does not price it separately here — not that caching is unavailable.
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 2026-10-25, 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.