Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Qwen3.5 (397B-A17B)

Pick two tools from the same category to compare side-by-side.

	Claude Haiku 4.5 Fast, cheap small model for classification, routing, high-volume work.	Qwen3.5 (397B-A17B) Alibaba's Apache-2.0 open-weight Qwen3.5 flagship MoE with very low active-parameter cost and broad multilingual coverage.
Category	model	model
Vendor type	commercial	open source
Pricing	usage	free
Strengths	+ Lowest cost in Claude family + Low latency suitable for real-time interactions + Strong instruction-following for its size	+ Permissive Apache 2.0 license + Only 17B active parameters, enabling comparatively cheap inference + First-class MCP and tool-calling support via Qwen-Agent + 201-language coverage for multilingual agents
Tradeoffs	− Weaker on complex reasoning vs Sonnet/Opus − Lower context window than Sonnet	− Long context beyond 262K requires YaRN extension rather than native support − Flagship commercial Qwen3-Max capabilities are not part of the open release
Used in stacks	4	0