o3 vs Qwen3-Coder-480B: Detailed Comparison
Choosing between o3 (OpenAI) and
Qwen3-Coder-480B (Alibaba) comes down to three things:
per-token pricing, context window, and which capability matters most for your workload.
o3 costs $2.00/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 | o3 | Qwen3-Coder-480B |
|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | Alibaba |
|---|
| Released | 2025-04-16 | 2025-07-22 |
|---|
| Input price |
$2.00/M |
$2.00/M |
| Output price |
$8.00/M |
$6.00/M |
| Cached input |
$0.5000/M |
— |
| Context window |
200K |
1.0M |
| Max output |
100K |
66K |
| Modalities |
text image |
text |
| Tokenizer |
o200k_base |
qwen |
Capability matrix
| Capability | o3 | Qwen3-Coder-480B |
|---|
| function calling |
Yes |
Yes |
| json mode |
Yes |
Yes |
| vision |
Yes |
No |
| reasoning |
Yes |
No |
| streaming |
No |
Yes |
| code |
No |
Yes |
| tool use |
No |
Yes |
Benchmark comparison
Higher is better for all benchmarks shown.
Per-call cost on typical workloads
| Workload (in/out tokens) | o3 | Qwen3-Coder-480B | Cheaper by |
|---|
| Standard chat (1K / 500) |
$0.006000 |
$0.005000 |
Qwen3-Coder-480B by $0.001000 |
| RAG (4K / 500) |
$0.012000 |
$0.011000 |
Qwen3-Coder-480B by $0.001000 |
| Long doc (20K / 1K) |
$0.048000 |
$0.046000 |
Qwen3-Coder-480B by $0.002000 |
| Very long context (100K / 2K) |
$0.212000 |
$0.209000 |
Qwen3-Coder-480B by $0.003000 |
When to choose o3 over Qwen3-Coder-480B
- Supports vision — Qwen3-Coder-480B does not.
- Supports reasoning — Qwen3-Coder-480B does not.
When to choose Qwen3-Coder-480B over o3
- Larger context window (1.0M vs 200K).
- Supports streaming — o3 does not.
- Supports code — o3 does not.
- Supports tool use — o3 does not.
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