Claude Opus 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) vs Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning)
Which is better for the money: Claude Opus 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) by Anthropic or Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning) by Alibaba? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.
Depends on your budget
Claude Opus 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallba… scores 40.0 points higher (51.2 vs 11.2) but costs 4.9× as much to run the benchmark ($1627 vs $329; premium vs mid-range cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Claude Opus 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallba… when you need intelligence above 11.2, and Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning) when 11.2 is enough.
| Metric | Claude Opus 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) | Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence (higher is better) | 51.2 | 11.2 | −78.1% Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning) is 78.1% less intelligent |
| Total AA cost (lower is better) | $1,626.81 | $328.86 | −79.8% Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning) is 79.8% cheaper |
| End-to-end time (lower is better) | 21.80s | 42.11s | +93.2% Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning) is 93.2% slower |
| Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | $4.00 / $20.0 | $0.14 / $0.20 | |
| Input modalities | Text, Image | Text, Image, Video |
Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning) vs Claude Opus 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback): 78.1% less intelligence, 79.8% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 93.2% slower end-to-end.
Against the frontier
- Claude Opus 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Max) scores 51.80 for $1082.
- Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, MiMo-V2.6-Pro scores 46.30 for $207.
Compare something else
Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/claude-opus-5-5-medium/qwen3-5-9b · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-opus-5-5-medium/qwen3-5-9b?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill