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Qwen 3 Max vs GPT-5 Mini
Qwen vs OpenAI. Specs, benchmarks, and real per-task cost — all in one page.
Verdict
Qwen 3 Max leads on LMSYS ELO (1295 vs 1288). GPT-5 Mini is ~3.2× cheaper on a 3:1 input:output blend. Qwen 3 Max is open-weights, the other is proprietary.
Qwen
Qwen 3 MaxAlibaba’s flagship. Strongest non-English coverage of any open model; dominant in Asian markets.
MultilingualOpen weightsCompetitive coding
OpenAI
GPT-5 MiniGPT-5’s smaller, cheaper sibling. Optimized for chat and lightweight agent tasks.
Very low latencyCheap enough for mass consumer apps
Pricing
Input / 1M$1.60$0.50
Output / 1M$6.40$2.00
Context128K256K
Max output16K16K
LicenseOpen weightsProprietary
Released2025-11-202026-01-21
Benchmarks
LMSYS ELO1295.01288.0
MMLU Pro84.078.5
HumanEval87.285.5
MATH85.179.8
MMMU71.8—
IFEval85.585.4
Per-task cost
Summarize a 1-hour meeting transcript$0.027$0.0085
Review a 500-line pull request$0.026$0.0080
Answer a customer support ticket$0.0099$0.0031
Extract structured data from a resume$0.014$0.0045
Debug a stack trace with context$0.022$0.0070
Per-call cost using published token counts for each task. Real-world prompts vary.