Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Qwen3-Coder-480B: Detailed Comparison
Choosing between Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic) and
Qwen3-Coder-480B (Alibaba) comes down to three things:
per-token pricing, context window, and which capability matters most for your workload.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs $3.00/M input vs
$2.00/M for Qwen3-Coder-480B;
context windows are 200K vs
1.0M tokens. Detailed breakdown below.
Side-by-side specs
| Spec | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Qwen3-Coder-480B |
|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Alibaba |
|---|
| Released | 2026-03-12 | 2025-07-22 |
|---|
| Input price |
$3.00/M |
$2.00/M |
| Output price |
$15.00/M |
$6.00/M |
| Cached input |
$0.3000/M |
— |
| Context window |
200K |
1.0M |
| Max output |
64K |
66K |
| Modalities |
text image |
text |
| Tokenizer |
claude-3 |
qwen |
Capability matrix
| Capability | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Qwen3-Coder-480B |
|---|
| function calling |
Yes |
Yes |
| json mode |
Yes |
Yes |
| vision |
Yes |
No |
| streaming |
Yes |
Yes |
| tool use |
Yes |
Yes |
| code |
No |
Yes |
Benchmark comparison
Higher is better for all benchmarks shown.
Per-call cost on typical workloads
| Workload (in/out tokens) | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Qwen3-Coder-480B | Cheaper by |
|---|
| Standard chat (1K / 500) |
$0.010500 |
$0.005000 |
Qwen3-Coder-480B by $0.005500 |
| RAG (4K / 500) |
$0.019500 |
$0.011000 |
Qwen3-Coder-480B by $0.008500 |
| Long doc (20K / 1K) |
$0.075000 |
$0.046000 |
Qwen3-Coder-480B by $0.029000 |
| Very long context (100K / 2K) |
$0.322500 |
$0.209000 |
Qwen3-Coder-480B by $0.113500 |
When to choose Claude Sonnet 4.6 over Qwen3-Coder-480B
- Supports vision — Qwen3-Coder-480B does not.
When to choose Qwen3-Coder-480B over Claude Sonnet 4.6
- Per-token input cost is 33% lower than Claude Sonnet 4.6.
- Larger context window (1.0M vs 200K).
- Supports code — Claude Sonnet 4.6 does not.
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