Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) vs Qwen3.8 27B (Non-reasoning)

Which is better for the money: Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) by Anthropic or Qwen3.8 27B (Non-reasoning) by Alibaba? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-27.

Trade-off

AnthropicClaude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback)On the frontier

Intelligence: 53.60
Total cost: $2172

AlibabaQwen3.8 27B (Non-reasoning)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 20.20
Total cost: $2022

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) scores 33.4 points higher (53.6 vs 20.2) but costs 1.1× as much to run the benchmark ($2172 vs $2022; both flagship class). Pick Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) when the extra intelligence is worth the premium, otherwise Qwen3.8 27B (Non-reasoning).

Metric	Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback)	Qwen3.8 27B (Non-reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	53.6	20.2	−62.3% Qwen3.8 27B (Non-reas… is 62.3% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$2,172.43	$2,022.49	−6.9% Qwen3.8 27B (Non-reas… is 6.9% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	40.99s	13.84s	−66.2% Qwen3.8 27B (Non-reas… is 66.2% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$4.00 / $20.0	$0.50 / $3.00
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text, Image, Video

Qwen3.8 27B (Non-reasoning) vs Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback): 62.3% less intelligence, 6.9% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 66.2% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback): what beats it Qwen3.8 27B (Non-reasoning): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) is on today's frontier: nothing is both smarter and cheaper.
Qwen3.8 27B (Non-reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Max) scores 51.80 for $1082.

Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback)Qwen3.8 27B (Non-reasoning)Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model

Matchup

Compare something else

Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/claude-opus-5-5-high/qwen3-8-27b-non-reasoning · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-opus-5-5-high/qwen3-8-27b-non-reasoning?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill