Compare / Qwen3.5-2B vs Claude Opus 5.5

Qwen3.5-2B vs Claude Opus 5.5

Which is cheaper, which is more capable, and which does better at each kind of work, from 6 results on 2 sources that measured both models.

Results as of 8 October 2026 (catalogue release 2026-10-08-4199ce0620fe).

Qwen3.5-2B
Alibaba · profile
Claude Opus 5.5
Anthropic · profile
Results compared
6
Shared sources
2

Qwen3.5-2B or Claude Opus 5.5? The short answer

Pick Claude Opus 5.5: it scores higher (Intelligence Index 57.6 against 6.9) at about the same price.

  • Claude Opus 5.5 scores higher on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index: 57.6 against 6.9.
  • Claude Opus 5.5 is newer: released 22 Sep 2026, against 2 Mar 2026 for Qwen3.5-2B.
  • On third-party benchmarks, on the results both models have: Claude Opus 5.5 does better for reasoning and knowledge and writing.

At a glance

Qwen3.5-2BClaude Opus 5.5
Price per million tokensNot on sale$4.00 in · $20.00 out
Blended (3 in : 1 out)–$8.00
Cheapest host, blended–$8.00 (Amazon Bedrock)
Cached input, per million–$0.20 cached input
Intelligence Index6.957.6
Spring Prompt overall–85
Output speed, tokens a second–97
Context window–1,000,000 tokens
Released2 Mar 202622 Sep 2026 (newer)
WeightsClosedClosed
Developer based inChinathe US

Prices are the developer's list price where we have read it, otherwise the typical host on OpenRouter; see every model's price. Intelligence and speed from Artificial Analysis.

Which is better for what

Each model's rank among models available today, for each kind of work, from our own benchmarks and licensed sources. The better rank is in green.

Use caseQwen3.5-2BClaude Opus 5.5
Product listingsTurning a sparse product feed and photos into listings that can go live not measured 6 of 20
Decks from an analysisTurning a finished analysis into a deck you could present as it is not measured 5 of 19
User surveysPlanning a user survey and reading its results without being misled not measured 2 of 8
Marketing planningPlanning a year of ad spend without overspending not measured 5 of 19
Agents and tool useMulti-step tasks with tools: support desks, coding agents, function calls 162 of 165 2 of 164
Professional workReal tasks from banking, consulting and law, business documents and freelance projects not measured 3 of 51
Reasoning and knowledgeHard questions across science, maths and general knowledge 172 of 199 1 of 198
WritingWhat people prefer in blind comparisons, and judged writing quality 156 of 189 4 of 188
Sticking to the factsSummarising without inventing things, and factual answers not measured 2 of 152
Speed under pressureGood decisions against a real clock (fast chess) not measured 23 of 23

Every shared result

Each model's best result on every measure both have, grouped by benchmark, with the setting that produced it. The headline measures of each benchmark come first; the rest are under "Show all". Green marks the better value; where a source reports ranges that overlap, neither is marked.

MeasureQwen3.5-2BClaude Opus 5.5
Artificial Analysis reported by Artificial Analysis · 3 results
Artificial Analysis Intelligence Indexindex score, higher is better 6.9thinking reasoning 57.6max reasoning
Humanity's Last Exam% of questions, higher is better 5.0%no reasoning 61.4%max reasoning
Long-context reasoning (AA-LCR)% of questions, higher is better 21.0%thinking reasoning 84.7%max reasoning
UGI Leaderboard reported by UGI Leaderboard · 3 results
Writing score · UGIscore out of 100, higher is better 29.0no reasoning 70.0low reasoning
Requested-length error · UGI% off the requested word count, lower is better 16.0%no reasoning 2.0%max reasoning
Style adherence · UGIscore from 0 to 1, higher is better 0.33think-prefill reasoning 0.43max reasoning

Quick answers

Is Qwen3.5-2B better than Claude Opus 5.5?

Pick Claude Opus 5.5: it scores higher (Intelligence Index 57.6 against 6.9) at about the same price.

Run Qwen3.5-2B and Claude Opus 5.5 on your own prompt

Benchmarks aren't your data. Try both side by side in the playground, with the cost of every answer.