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Claude Sonnet 5 vs Qwen3.5-27B

Side-by-side API pricing and Artificial Analysis performance for Claude Sonnet 5 (Anthropic) and Qwen3.5-27B (Alibaba (Qwen)). Green cells mark the better value in each row.

Prices updated Jul 22, 2026, 1:35 AM UTC · refreshed hourly

Claude Sonnet 5

Anthropic

Qwen3.5-27B

Alibaba (Qwen)

Pricing
Input $/1M$2.00$0.26
Output $/1M$10.00$2.60
Blended $/1M (3:1)$4.00$0.845
RAG example (30K in / 2K out)$0.08$0.013
Quality & speed
Intelligence Index53.433.8
Coding Index71.5
Agentic Index46.7
Output speed (tok/s)8880
Time to first token93.55s1.31s
Specs
Context window1M262K
Input modalitiestext, image, filetext, image, video

FAQ

Which is cheaper, Claude Sonnet 5 or Qwen3.5-27B?

Qwen3.5-27B has the lower blended API price at $0.845 per 1M tokens (3:1 input:output mix), versus $4.00 for the other model. Prices are live from OpenRouter and refresh about hourly.

Which is better for RAG workloads?

For a typical RAG request (30K input / 2K output tokens), Qwen3.5-27B costs about $0.013 per request versus $0.08. Also compare context windows: Claude Sonnet 5 offers 1M and Qwen3.5-27B offers 262K.

Which scores higher on Artificial Analysis benchmarks?

Claude Sonnet 5 leads on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (53.4 vs 33.8). Check coding and agentic indices on this page for workload-specific tradeoffs.