ModelRefs / Claude Opus 4 vs QwQ 32B
Claude Opus 4 vs QwQ 32B
Claude Opus 4 vs QwQ 32B: side-by-side benchmarks, pricing, context windows, coding ability and deployment. Pick the right model for your stack.
Overview
Claude Opus 4: Claude Opus 4 is Anthropic's May 2025 hybrid-reasoning model for complex coding, reasoning, multimodal analysis, and long-running agent workflows. The dated claude-opus-4-20250514 snapshot was retired on Anthropic-operated platforms on June 15, 2026 and is retained as a historical evaluation and migration reference.
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 Opus 4 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 Opus 4 vs QwQ 32B at a glance
| Attribute | Claude Opus 4 | QwQ 32B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Alibaba |
| Released | 2025-05-22 | 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 |
Where they differ most
- Coding: Claude Opus 4 60%, QwQ 32B 63%. QwQ 32B leads on this dimension.
Capability scores are ModelRefs' own derived signals, not vendor claims or benchmark results. Validate against your own workload before relying on them.
Continue your research
Use these connected ModelRefs sections to compare alternatives, inspect implementation paths, and review the evidence and governance boundaries relevant to Claude Opus 4 vs QwQ 32B.
Frequently asked questions
Which is better, Claude Opus 4 or QwQ 32B?
Claude Opus 4 and QwQ 32B target different workloads — see the benchmark and pricing tables for a side-by-side answer.
Is Claude Opus 4 cheaper than QwQ 32B?
Compare $0.0150 vs $0.00015 on this page.