Llama 3.3 70B vs Qwen3-Coder-480B: Detailed Comparison

Choosing between Llama 3.3 70B (Meta) and Qwen3-Coder-480B (Alibaba) comes down to three things: per-token pricing, context window, and which capability matters most for your workload. Llama 3.3 70B costs $0.59/M input vs $2.00/M for Qwen3-Coder-480B; context windows are 128K vs 1.0M tokens. Detailed breakdown below.

Side-by-side specs

SpecLlama 3.3 70BQwen3-Coder-480B
ProviderMetaAlibaba
Released2024-12-062025-07-22
Input price $0.59/M $2.00/M
Output price $0.79/M $6.00/M
Cached input
Context window 128K 1.0M
Max output 8K 66K
Modalities text text
Tokenizer llama-3 qwen

Capability matrix

CapabilityLlama 3.3 70BQwen3-Coder-480B
function calling Yes Yes
json mode Yes Yes
streaming Yes Yes
tool use Yes Yes
code No Yes

Benchmark comparison

Higher is better for all benchmarks shown.

BenchmarkCategoryLlama 3.3 70BQwen3-Coder-480BΔ
MMLU general 86.0
HumanEval coding 88.4
SWE-bench Verified coding 69.6
Aider Polyglot coding 63.4

Per-call cost on typical workloads

Workload (in/out tokens)Llama 3.3 70BQwen3-Coder-480BCheaper by
Standard chat (1K / 500) $0.000985 $0.005000 Llama 3.3 70B by $0.004015
RAG (4K / 500) $0.002755 $0.011000 Llama 3.3 70B by $0.008245
Long doc (20K / 1K) $0.012590 $0.046000 Llama 3.3 70B by $0.033410
Very long context (100K / 2K) $0.060185 $0.209000 Llama 3.3 70B by $0.148815

When to choose Llama 3.3 70B over Qwen3-Coder-480B

  • Per-token input cost is 71% lower — meaningful for high-volume workloads.

When to choose Qwen3-Coder-480B over Llama 3.3 70B

  • Larger context window (1.0M vs 128K).
  • Supports code — Llama 3.3 70B does not.

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