ModelRefs / Claude 3 Opus vs QwQ 32B
Claude 3 Opus vs QwQ 32B
Claude 3 Opus vs QwQ 32B: side-by-side benchmarks, pricing, context windows, coding ability and deployment. Pick the right model for your stack.
Overview
Claude 3 Opus: Claude 3 Opus is Anthropic's February 2024 frontier model and the most capable of the original Claude 3 family, accepting text and image input across a 200,000-token context window. The claude-3-opus-20240229 snapshot was deprecated on 30 June 2025 and retired on Anthropic-operated platforms on 5 January 2026, with Claude Opus 4.8 named as its replacement.
QwQ 32B: QwQ 32B is the reasoning model of Alibaba's Qwen series, a 32.5-billion-parameter causal language model (31.0 billion excluding embeddings) with 64 layers and grouped-query attention using 40 query and 8 key-value heads. It is built to work through a problem before answering rather than responding directly. The full context length is 131,072 tokens, though Qwen notes that prompts beyond 8,192 tokens require YaRN to be enabled. Released under Apache 2.0.
Context window: Claude 3 Opus accepts up to 200,000 tokens, QwQ 32B up to 131,072. Confirm the limit for your specific deployment channel before relying on it.
Claude 3 Opus vs QwQ 32B at a glance
| Attribute | Claude 3 Opus | QwQ 32B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Alibaba |
| Released | 2024-02-29 | 2025-03-06 |
| Context window | 200,000 tokens | 131,072 tokens |
| Input price | $15/M tokens | $0.15/M tokens |
| Output price | $75/M tokens | $0.6/M tokens |
| Licence | Proprietary | Apache-2.0 |
| Self-hostable | No, hosted only | Yes, open weights |
| Modalities | text, vision | text |
Continue your research
Use these connected ModelRefs sections to compare alternatives, inspect implementation paths, and review the evidence and governance boundaries relevant to Claude 3 Opus vs QwQ 32B.
Frequently asked questions
Which is better, Claude 3 Opus or QwQ 32B?
Claude 3 Opus and QwQ 32B target different workloads — see the benchmark and pricing tables for a side-by-side answer.
Is Claude 3 Opus cheaper than QwQ 32B?
Compare $0.0150 vs $0.00015 on this page.