Claude Haiku 4 vs Qwen 2.5 Max: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Qwen 2.5 Max is significantly cheaper at $0.16/$0.64 per million tokens vs $0.80/$4.00. Qwen 2.5 Max is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1250 vs 1195. Claude Haiku 4 is faster at 130 tokens/sec vs 80 tokens/sec. Qwen 2.5 Max ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1260 vs 1220. Claude Haiku 4 offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureClaude Haiku 4Qwen 2.5 Max
ProviderAnthropicAlibaba
Input Price / 1M tokens$1.00$0.160
Output Price / 1M tokens$5.00$0.640
Context Window200K128K
Max Output Tokens8,1928,192
Arena ELO1,2201,260
Coding ELO1,1951,250
TTFT (ms)150240
Tokens/sec13080
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesNo
When to Use Claude Haiku 4

Choose Claude Haiku 4 when you need: very fast response times, 200k context window, affordable for anthropic quality, good instruction following. It excels at chatbots, classification, cost-sensitive, high-volume tasks. Its 200K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • Very fast response times
  • 200K context window
  • Affordable for Anthropic quality
  • Good instruction following

Best for:

chatbotsclassificationcost-sensitivehigh-volume
When to Use Qwen 2.5 Max

Choose Qwen 2.5 Max when you need: extremely competitive pricing, strong coding and general capabilities, open-source model available, good multilingual support including chinese. It excels at coding, general-purpose, cost-sensitive, open-source tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

Strengths:

  • Extremely competitive pricing
  • Strong coding and general capabilities
  • Open-source model available
  • Good multilingual support including Chinese

Best for:

codinggeneral-purposecost-sensitiveopen-source

Frequently Asked Questions

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