Qwen3 235B-A22B vs GPT-5.5 — an open flagship against the OpenAI standard. Below is the full side-by-side: specifications, API pricing, context window, local hardware requirements, and a clear, data-driven recommendation on which to pick.
| Spec | Qwen3 235B-A22B | GPT-5.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Developer | Alibaba | OpenAI |
| Type | LLM (MoE) | LLM (reasoning) |
| Parameters | 235B total / 22B active (MoE) | Undisclosed |
| Context window | 128K | 1.05M |
| Modality | Text → Text | Text, Vision → Text |
| License | Apache 2.0 (open) | Proprietary |
| Open weights | ✅ Yes | ❌ No |
| Input price ($/1M) | $0.45 | $5.00 |
| Output price ($/1M) | $1.8 | $30.00 |
| VRAM (4-bit) | ~140 GB | — |
| Min GPU (local) | Multi-GPU or Mac 192GB | — |
| Released | 2025 | 2026 |
Key differences
- Cost: Qwen3 235B-A22B is 1329% cheaper than GPT-5.5 on a blended-token basis.
- Context: GPT-5.5 wins on context window (1.05M vs 128K) — better for long documents, large codebases and big RAG inputs.
- Openness: Qwen3 235B-A22B is open-weight (self-hostable, private, fine-tunable); GPT-5.5 is proprietary (API-only, but fully managed).
- Run Qwen3 235B-A22B locally: ~~140 GB at 4-bit (min Multi-GPU or Mac 192GB).
Which should you choose?
Choose Qwen3 235B-A22B if you want the lower per-token cost for high-volume workloads, or you want to self-host, fine-tune, or keep data fully private.
Choose GPT-5.5 if you need the larger context window, or you prefer a fully managed API with no infrastructure to run.
→ Estimate real costs in the API cost calculator · check local hardware in the VRAM calculator · browse all 30+ models.
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