Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct
Compare Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct side-by-side.
Compare Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct live
Run the same image across every model that supports a task and compare their outputs side-by-side.
These models don't share enough common tasks for a side-by-side demo. See the comparison table below for their capabilities.
Models in this comparison
Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct Comparison Table
Evals updated September 28, 2026Pricing updated September 28, 2026
| Property | Claude Sonnet 5.5 | Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| Organization | Anthropic | Qwen |
| Category | closed | open |
| Modality | multimodal | multimodal |
| Release Date | Sep 2026 | Oct 2025 |
| Context Window | 1.0M | 256K |
| Parameters | 8.8B | |
| License | Proprietary | Apache 2.0 |
| Pricing per 1M tokens | ||
| Input $/1M | $0.117 | |
| Output $/1M | $0.455 | |
| Vision Tasks | ||
| Captioning | Demo | |
| Chart Question Answering | ||
| Classification | ||
| Document Question Answering | ||
| Image Tagging | ||
| Multi-Label Classification | ||
| Object Detection | ||
| OCR | Demo | |
| Vision Language | ||
| Visual Question Answering | Demo | |
| Model Features | ||
| Foundation Vision | ||
| LLMs with Vision Capabilities | ||
| Multimodal Vision | ||
Vision Evalsground-truth scores across 6 vision tasks, pooled at low effort | ||
| Overall | 83.8% | Not evaluated |
| Avg cost / sample | $0.0065 | – |
| Avg speed / sample | 10.78s | – |
| By task | ||
| Object Detection (low) | 74.3% ±0.9, Mean of 3 runs, range 73.5 to 75.3 | – |
| Object Detection (high) | 76.8% ±0.4, Mean of 3 runs, range 76.5 to 77.3 | – |
| Counting (low) | 79.3% ±0.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 78.4 to 79.7 | – |
| Counting (high) | 82.9% ±1.4, Mean of 3 runs, range 81.1 to 83.8 | – |
| Identification (low) | 91.7% ±3.1, Mean of 3 runs, range 87.5 to 93.8 | – |
| Identification (high) | 90.6% ±0.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 90.6 to 90.6 | – |
| OCR (low) | 90.6% ±0.9, Mean of 3 runs, range 90.0 to 91.7 | – |
| OCR (high) | 90.9% ±1.5, Mean of 3 runs, range 89.2 to 92.3 | – |
| Data Extraction (low) | 90.7% ±1.5, Mean of 3 runs, range 89.7 to 92.8 | – |
| Data Extraction (high) | 93.1% ±0.5, Mean of 3 runs, range 92.8 to 93.8 | – |
| Reasoning (low) | 76.4% ±0.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 75.5 to 76.8 | – |
| Reasoning (high) | 83.9% ±1.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 82.1 to 85.4 | – |
Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct: Overview
Claude Sonnet 5.5 is a proprietary multimodal language model from Anthropic and the second release in the Claude 5.5 family, following Claude Opus 5.5. It accepts interleaved text and image input and returns text, operating with a 1M token context window and a maximum output of 128K tokens per request. The model uses adaptive thinking by default, allocating variable reasoning effort per request rather than exposing a manual extended thinking toggle, and its training data cutoff is June 2026. Anthropic positions it as a faster, lower cost complement to Opus 5.5 for well scoped everyday tasks, bug fixing, and producing documents, slides, and spreadsheets.
On visual and agentic evaluations reported at launch, Sonnet 5.5 scores 61.6% on Chartography, a chart recognition test, compared with 15.6% for Claude Sonnet 5, and 80.1% on OSWorld 2.1, a computer use benchmark measuring screenshot driven control of a desktop environment, compared with 57.0% for Sonnet 5. It reports 70.6% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 for agentic coding. Anthropic describes it as the first Sonnet model able to complete Pokemon Red from screenshots alone, and it generates output more than 30% faster than Sonnet 5 while using fewer tokens for equivalent work.
Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct is an open-weight multimodal vision-language model developed by Qwen / Alibaba Cloud as part of the Qwen3-VL series, designed for instruction-following tasks that combine text with visual inputs such as images and video. Released around October 2025 under the Apache-2.0 license, it targets developers who need capable multimodal reasoning without the scale or cost of very large models.
The model contains roughly 8.8 billion dense parameters and supports text, image, and video understanding with strong spatial perception, visual reasoning, and emerging visual agent abilities such as GUI interaction. A standout feature is its native ~256K token context window, extendable to around 1M tokens, enabling long-document reading and extended video comprehension. In today’s landscape, it balances openness, long-context capacity, and solid multimodal performance against heavier proprietary models. Typical applications include multimodal assistants, document and video analysis, visual question answering, and research or product prototyping where transparency and deployability matter.
Frequently Asked Questions
Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct has not yet been evaluated on Roboflow's current Vision Evals, so this comparison shows specs, licensing, and pricing rather than benchmark scores.
Claude Sonnet 5.5 is released under Proprietary, while Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct uses Apache 2.0. Licensing often matters more than raw accuracy for commercial deployments, so check the terms against how you plan to ship.