COMPARISON · Last verified: September 2026

ChatGPT vs Qwen

OpenAI's assistant and Alibaba's Qwen models, compared on free plans, prices, models, open weights and privacy.

ChatGPT vs Qwen: official demos

Official videos from OpenAI and Qwen, side by side.

ChatGPT

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Qwen

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Official videos via YouTube (OpenAI; Qwen), embedded for reference. ToolChase does not host or claim these videos.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is OpenAI's AI assistant. It now works in three modes: Chat for questions and back-and-forth, ChatGPT Work for larger tasks that end in a reviewable result such as a deck, a spreadsheet or a report, and Codex for software development. ChatGPT runs on the web and on iOS and Android, and its desktop app is available for macOS, Windows and Linux. The Free plan includes unlimited text chats with GPT-5.6 Luna (subject to abuse guardrails), web search, projects and study mode, plus limited uploads, image generation, voice chats, memory and deep research. Paid plans raise those limits, and Plus adds GPT-6 Astra, which OpenAI calls its most capable model, alongside the GPT-5.6 family (Sol, Terra and Luna). OpenAI says ads may appear on the Free and Go plans, while Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts are ad-free.

What is Qwen?

Qwen is the family of large language models built by Alibaba Cloud, and you can use it three ways. The assistant runs on the web as Qwen Studio at chat.qwen.ai (Qwen's Hugging Face page still calls it Qwen Chat) and in apps for iOS, Android, macOS and Windows, and Qwen says it is "free to use, open to all." Qwen lists Thinking, Search, Deep Research, Image Generation, Image Edit, Video Generation, Web Dev and Artifacts among its features, and says the assistant can process up to 1 million tokens from uploaded documents. Its flagship, Qwen3.8-Max, released on August 3, 2026, is the most capable Qwen model to date, with 2.4 trillion parameters (95 billion active) and a 1M-token context window on Qwen Cloud, which Qwen's model cards call the official Qwen API service; Alibaba Cloud Model Studio also sells Qwen models, and Qwen says its API format is compatible with the OpenAI API. Qwen publishes weights on Hugging Face too, from the Apache 2.0 Qwen3.8-27B to the Qwen3.8-Max weights under a custom license, and offers Qwen Code, an open-source coding agent.

Key differences at a glance

Both are general-purpose AI assistants backed by their own model families. The differences that matter most:

• -- Cost of the app: ChatGPT's paid plans start at Go, $8 a month in the US, and GPT-6 Astra starts on Plus at $20; Qwen says its assistant is free to use, and it charges for API access and developer plans.
• -- Weights: Qwen publishes downloadable weights, including the Apache 2.0 Qwen3.8-27B; OpenAI's open-weight releases include gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, and GPT-6 Astra and GPT-5.6 are offered through ChatGPT and the OpenAI API.
• -- API price: per million input/output tokens, Qwen3.8-Max costs $2/$6 against $10/$50 for GPT-6 Astra, and Qwen3.8-Flash costs $0.15/$0.47 against $0.20/$1.20 for GPT-5.6 Luna.
• -- Data: ChatGPT's individual plans may use your chats for training, with an opt-out, and Business excludes business data by default; Qwen stores personal data in Singapore and may train on de-identified content.
• -- Coding: Codex comes with ChatGPT plans and expands on Plus, and its CLI is open source; Qwen Code is free, open-source software that you connect to a model provider.
• -- Score: ChatGPT rates 4.8/5 in our review; Qwen rates 4.3/5.

Feature-by-feature comparison

How the two compare on apps, models, APIs and tools:

Pricing comparison

ChatGPT is priced per person. The Free plan costs $0. In the US, Go is $8 a month (OpenAI notes that Go pricing is localized in some markets), Plus is $20 a month, and Pro starts at $100 a month for 5x Plus usage; OpenAI temporarily paused new sign-ups and upgrades to its $200 Pro tier (20x usage) on September 10, 2026. Go, Plus and Pro are billed monthly; OpenAI says it does not support annual billing for them. Business is for teams of 2 to 200: Standard seats cost $20 per seat per month billed annually or $25 billed monthly, and Premium seats, with 5x the usage of Standard, cost $100 or $125. Enterprise is custom-priced. On the API, per million input/output tokens, GPT-6 Astra costs $10/$50 and GPT-5.6 Luna $0.20/$1.20, with higher rates for prompts over 272K input tokens.

Qwen charges in different places. Qwen says its chat is free to use, and the open weights are free to download; your cost is the compute that runs them. The Android app lists in-app purchases. The API is pay-as-you-go: on Alibaba Cloud Model Studio's international price list, Qwen3.8-Max costs $2/$6 per million input/output tokens for requests up to 1M tokens, and Qwen3.8-Flash costs $0.15/$0.47. Many models on Model Studio come with a free quota of 1 million tokens, valid for 90 days and only in the Singapore region. For coding and agent tools, Qwen Cloud's Token Plan is a credits subscription: Personal tiers list from $8 (Lite) to $80 (Pro) a month, each currently discounted, and Team Edition Standard seats list at $30 per seat per month ($20 at the limited-time price).

On ChatGPT, Go adds more messages with tools, uploads, image creation and voice chats but may still show ads; Plus is the first ad-free tier and the first with GPT-6 Astra and expanded deep research. To call Qwen's API from your own apps, you pay per token; the Token Plan covers only interactive use in coding and agent tools, and Lite gives 2,500 Credits per 7-day window. Worked example: a 5-person team on ChatGPT Business Standard seats pays $125 a month billed monthly, or $100 a month ($1,200 a year) billed annually, while the same five people can use Qwen Studio for $0. For an app that sends 10 million input and 2 million output tokens a month, in prompts under 272K tokens, the API bill is $200 on GPT-6 Astra, $32 on Qwen3.8-Max, $4.40 on GPT-5.6 Luna and $2.44 on Qwen3.8-Flash. Tokenizers differ, so treat these as estimates.

Bottom Line

ChatGPT (4.8/5 in our review) is the stronger fit for one polished assistant with GPT-6 Astra, deep research, ChatGPT Work and Codex in a single subscription, or a team workspace with admin controls. Qwen (4.3/5) is the stronger fit when cost and control come first: free chat, weights you can run on your own hardware, and API list prices well below OpenAI's flagship rates. The two also mix: Codex can connect to other model providers, and Qwen Cloud's Token Plan lists Codex as a supported tool.

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