Qwen vs ChatGPT: Which One Should You Actually Use?

Qwen vs ChatGPT is closer than most comparisons admit. On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.3.2, Alibaba's Qwen3.8 Max (0902) scores 45.4, against 47.6 for GPT-6 Sol, the model that answers in ChatGPT's paid Chat tab. The gap is small. The bill is not. Qwen needed $5.41 in API spend per test task where GPT-6 Sol needed $1.04. And if you live in the US or the EU, Qwen's iPhone app is not in your App Store at all.

This guide compares the two on what anyone can check today. That means independent scores, the free tiers, the paid plans and APIs, where each app is actually available, and what Alibaba's own privacy policy says happens to your chats. Every number comes from the vendor's own pages or from Artificial Analysis, read on 14 October 2026. Every version number is stamped, so you can tell when it goes stale.

The Key Takeaways

• ChatGPT is slightly smarter on paid plans: GPT-6 Sol scores 47.6 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.3.2, Qwen3.8 Max (0902) scores 45.4, and GPT-6 Astra, ChatGPT's Pro reasoning model, scores 52.7.
• Qwen gives free users a bigger model: Qwen Studio lists the flagship Qwen3.8-Max for free, while ChatGPT Free and Go run GPT-6 Luna, which scores 38.1.
• Cheaper tokens, pricier answers: Qwen3.8-Max costs $2 / $6 per million tokens against $2 / $10 for GPT-6.1 Sol, but Artificial Analysis rates it "very verbose", and it cost about five times more per test task.
• Qwen's iPhone apps are missing from the US and EU App Stores: they are listed in the UK, Canada, Australia, India and Japan, among others, as of 14 October 2026.
• Your Qwen chats are stored in Singapore: the service is run by a Singapore company, inputs are processed by Alibaba Cloud (Singapore), and the privacy policy allows training on de-identified chats.

Qwen vs ChatGPT at a Glance

Qwen vs ChatGPT comes down to a trade. ChatGPT is the more polished, more concise and slightly stronger product. Qwen gives away more for free and lets you download the weights. Here is the side-by-side, checked against the vendors and Artificial Analysis on 14 October 2026.

Is Qwen Better Than ChatGPT?

No, not overall. ChatGPT's paid models score higher on the one neutral leaderboard that runs both through the same tests, and they get there with fewer words. Qwen comes close enough, though, that the answer flips for a free user, because Qwen puts its flagship in the free tier and ChatGPT does not.

The Benchmark Scores

GPT-6 Sol leads Qwen3.8 Max by 2.2 points on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.3.2, and GPT-6 Astra leads it by 7.3. The index combines ten evaluations into one score, including Terminal-Bench 4.0, Humanity's Last Exam and the AA-Omniscience knowledge test. If that index is new to you, our guide to what AI benchmarks actually measure explains how it works. Scores move with the reasoning setting, so each one below carries it.

Read the middle two rows together. Qwen3.8 Max trails GPT-6 Sol by 2.2 points, a small gap at this level.

It sits 7.3 points above GPT-6 Luna, the model a free ChatGPT user actually gets. For the full launch story, including how Alibaba's own benchmark claims held up against independent tests, see our Qwen 3.8 breakdown.

Why Qwen Costs More per Answer

Qwen3.8 Max writes far more to reach its answers. Artificial Analysis describes it as "notably slow and very verbose". It generated 190 million tokens to complete the index, against a median of 85 million, and ran at 42 tokens per second. GPT-6 Sol, in the same harness, is "faster than average and fairly concise", with 77 million tokens at 104 tokens per second.

That verbosity cancels Qwen's price advantage. Its output tokens cost 40% less than GPT-6 Sol's, but it produced about two and a half times as many. A typical task cost $5.41 on Qwen against $1.04 on GPT-6 Sol.

On the free consumer app you never see that bill. On the API, it is the number that matters.

Coding and Knowledge

ChatGPT's models lead on agentic coding. On Terminal-Bench 4.0, which Artificial Analysis uses to measure agentic coding and terminal use, Qwen3.8 Max (0902) solves 38.9% of tasks and GPT-6 Sol (Max) 43.9%. GPT-6.1 Sol, the newer model ChatGPT offers in Codex, scores 51.8 on the overall index, more than four points above GPT-6 Sol. A free user faces a different matchup: GPT-6 Luna scores 38.1 overall, 7.3 points below Qwen's flagship.

The gap is wider on factual recall. On AA-Omniscience, Artificial Analysis's knowledge test, Qwen3.8 Max answers 31.7% correctly and GPT-6 Sol 54.5%. For questions where being right about a fact matters more than reasoning, ChatGPT is the safer pick.

Qwen vs ChatGPT Pricing: Free Tiers, Plans and API

Qwen is free for chatting and has no consumer subscription. ChatGPT is free with limits and sells four personal plans from $8 to $500 a month. The paid plan Alibaba does sell is for developers, not for the chat app, and comparison sites often mix the two up.

What You Get for Free

Qwen's free tier includes its flagship model, and ChatGPT's does not. Alibaba's Qwen site calls the assistant "free to use, open to all", and its public model list offers three models to free users: Qwen3.7-Plus, Qwen3.8-Max and Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash. The same list shows image generation, image editing, text-to-video, web search, deep research, slides and a web-development mode. Alibaba does not publish usage caps for the free tier, so treat any claim that it is unlimited as unverified.

ChatGPT Free gives unlimited everyday text chats on GPT-6 Luna, plus limited uploads, image creation, voice, deep research, memory and Codex. OpenAI's ads help page says ads "may appear for users on the Free and Go plans", with testing that started in the US on 9 February 2026. Free users who prefer no ads can switch to an Ads-Free mode with lower limits.

ChatGPT's Paid Plans

ChatGPT Go costs $8 a month in the US, Plus $20, and Pro comes in three tiers at $100, $200 and $500. GPT-6 reached the Chat tab on 7 October 2026 for paid plans and a day later for Free and Go. Plus and Pro now answer with GPT-6 Sol. Free and Go use GPT-6 Luna, and Pro's reasoning option runs GPT-6 Astra. Go and Plus also raise the context window from 27K tokens on Free to 54K for quick answers and 256K for reasoning. Our full ChatGPT pricing guide covers what each tier adds, plan by plan.

The Qwen Plan That Is Not for Chatting

Alibaba's Model Studio Token Plan Personal Edition comes in four tiers: Lite, Essential, Standard and Pro, at $6, $10, $18 or $68 a month on limited-time prices (list $8, $16, $25 and $80). It is a monthly bundle of API credits for coding and agent tools such as Qwen Code, Claude Code, Cursor and OpenClaw, and Alibaba restricts it to interactive use inside those tools. It does not unlock anything in Qwen Studio. If a comparison site lists it as "Qwen pricing" next to ChatGPT Plus, it is comparing a developer plan to a chat subscription. Our Qwen pricing guide breaks down the per-model API rates behind it.

API Prices Side by Side

OpenAI's prices are its standard short-context rates; long prompts cost more. Qwen3.8-Max charges the same rate across its whole 1-million-token window. GPT-6 Sol itself no longer appears on OpenAI's API price list, because GPT-6.1 Sol replaced it there.

Where You Can Use Each One: Apps on iPhone and Mac

ChatGPT works on the web, iPhone, Android, Mac and Windows in every country OpenAI supports. That list does not include mainland China or Hong Kong. Qwen works on the web everywhere, but its phone apps are region-locked in ways none of the ranking comparison pages mention.

Qwen's iPhone App Is Not in the US or EU App Store

Qwen has two international iPhone apps, Qwen Studio and a second Qwen app released in September 2026, both published by NTH Power Global Tech Singapore, the company that runs Qwen. We checked Apple's App Store listing for both in 22 countries on 14 October 2026. Both are listed in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, Singapore and the UAE. Neither is listed in the US, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Poland, Ireland or South Korea.

So an American or EU reader who searches the App Store for Qwen finds third-party apps instead, including one called "Gwen AI" from an unrelated developer. Inside those markets, the official ways in are the browser at chat.qwen.ai and the desktop apps.

On a Mac

Both have desktop apps for a Mac. OpenAI offers ChatGPT for Mac and Windows from its download page. Alibaba's download page lists Qwen desktop apps for macOS and Windows, distributed from qwen.ai rather than the Mac App Store. If you want Qwen on a Mac without an Alibaba account, our Qwen desktop client for Mac page covers that route.

Is Qwen Safe? Privacy, Training and Censorship

Qwen is fine for everyday questions, but keep confidential material out of it. Its policy allows training on de-identified chats without naming a setting to turn that off. And an earlier version of the service blocked politically sensitive questions. Here is what the primary sources say.

Where Your Data Goes

Qwen's privacy policy names the operator as NTH Power Global Tech Singapore Pte. Ltd., a Singapore-registered company. It states: "We collect, process, and store your personal data in Singapore." When you chat, "your input content is sent to our AI technology service provider, Alibaba Cloud (Singapore) Private Limited". You can read the full text in Qwen's privacy policy. For EU, UK and Swiss users, the policy relies on adequacy decisions and standard contractual clauses for the transfer.

Whether Your Chats Train the Model

Qwen's policy allows training on de-identified chats. Qwen's operator "may use de-identified user content and feedback data to train and improve" its models, it says, but "will not use your raw input data to directly train AI models". The legal basis is legitimate interests. That gives you a general right to object, but the policy names no in-app training switch. ChatGPT also trains on chats by default, and OpenAI lists "Opt-out available" for that on every personal plan, with a setting in Data Controls.

Content Filtering

Qwen has a documented history of blocking political topics. A University of Michigan and UC Berkeley study presented at NDSS 2026 sent 240 sensitive queries to five Chinese chatbots in March 2025, when chat.qwen.ai ran Qwen2.5-Max. Qwen blocked 16 of 80 English queries at least once, 24 of 80 in Simplified Chinese and 22 of 80 in Traditional Chinese. It did 74% of its blocking before the model even answered. That test predates the Singapore operator and the Qwen 3.8 models, so treat it as history, not a current measurement. Nobody has published a comparable test of today's Qwen Studio.

Open Weights: Where Qwen Pulls Ahead

Qwen publishes its weights and ChatGPT's models stay closed. Qwen3.8-27B is on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0, and Unsloth, which publishes compressed builds, says its 4-bit version runs on "a Mac with 24GB RAM". Alibaba also released Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B, the text-only base of its flagship, under a custom Qwen3.8-Max licence. It needs server hardware.

OpenAI's only open models are gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b from August 2025, also Apache 2.0, and they score 11.6 and 9.0 on the same index, far below Qwen3.8-27B at 33.7. If you want a capable model that runs on your own machine and never sends a prompt anywhere, Qwen is the better family by a wide margin. Our ranking of the best Chinese AI models shows how Qwen compares with DeepSeek, Kimi and GLM on the same terms.

Which One Should You Use?

Most people should use ChatGPT, and many should keep Qwen open next to it. The deciding questions are whether you pay, where you live and what you are asking.

Choose ChatGPT When

Choose ChatGPT if you pay for an AI subscription. GPT-6 Sol on Plus outscores Qwen's flagship, and in Artificial Analysis's tests it wrote more than twice as fast. It is also the better pick for factual questions, where it leads AA-Omniscience by more than 20 points, and for coding agents, where Codex offers GPT-6.1 Sol. And choose it if you want an iPhone app in the US or the EU, or a training opt-out you can click.

Choose Qwen When

Choose Qwen if you will not pay, because Qwen Studio's free flagship outscores ChatGPT Free's GPT-6 Luna by about seven points. It also suits long documents, where Qwen lists a 1-million-token context against ChatGPT Free's 27K. Want open weights to run locally? Of these two, only Qwen has serious ones. If you are weighing a different Chinese rival, our DeepSeek vs ChatGPT comparison covers the cheapest one.

You Do Not Have to Pick One

The practical answer for a lot of readers is both: ChatGPT for the everyday questions and the facts, Qwen for the long document and the second opinion. Fello AI puts Qwen and ChatGPT's GPT models in one app on Mac, iPhone and iPad. Ask both the same question in the same window, without a second account. That works on iPhones in countries where Alibaba's own app is not in the App Store, too.

The Verdict

ChatGPT is the better product and Qwen is the better free deal. If you pay $20 a month, GPT-6 Sol gives you a slightly stronger model that is more concise and far better at facts. It also comes in an app you can download from the US and EU App Stores. If you pay nothing, Qwen hands you its flagship while ChatGPT hands you Luna, and that 7-point gap is the clearest win either side has. Just read the privacy policy first. Qwen may train on your de-identified chats, and its policy names no setting to turn that off.

Frequently Asked Questions