$ diff qwen-3-8 longcat-2-0

Qwen 3.8 Max vs LongCat-2.0

Values come from Qwen 3.8 Max and LongCat-2.0, where each is cited to its source. This page states no benchmark result and ranks neither model — it puts two published specifications next to each other. Where a lab has not published a figure, the row says so rather than guessing.

Alibaba QwenQwen 3.8 Max

context: 1M
weights: open
$/M in: $2
$/M out: $6

MeituanLongCat-2.0

context: 1M
weights: open
$/M in: $0.3
$/M out: $1.2

What actually differs

Context window: Identical — both accept 1M tokens, so context length is not a reason to pick either.
Input price: LongCat-2.0 at $0.3/M against $2/M — 6.7× cheaper to feed. Standard rates: one of these labs also quotes a lower cached-input tier, which applies only when a prefix is reused — see the full spec below.
Output price: LongCat-2.0 at $1.2/M against $6/M — 5.0× cheaper to generate. Output dominates the bill on most agentic workloads, where the model writes far more than it reads.
Weights: Both publish weights — Qwen 3.8 Max under Open-weight announced for the week of 2026-08-10; not yet shipped, LongCat-2.0 under MIT (commercially permissive). Check the licences rather than assuming they permit the same commercial use.
Recency: Qwen 3.8 Max shipped 34 days after LongCat-2.0 (2026-08-03 vs 2026-06-30).

Full spec

Attribute	Qwen 3.8 Max	LongCat-2.0
Developer	Alibaba Qwen	Meituan
Released	2026-08-03	2026-06-30
Context window	1 million tokens	1 million tokens (LongCat Sparse Attention / LSA)
Pricing	$2 / M input · $6 / M output	$0.30/M input · $1.20/M output ($0.006/M cached input) — OpenRouter catalogue, read 2026-07-28. Open weights, so this is hosted-inference pricing rather than a licence fee.
License	Open-weight announced for the week of 2026-08-10; not yet shipped	MIT (commercially permissive)
Availability	Alibaba Cloud Model Studio (global), QwenWork	Open-sourced 2026-06-30; previously served on OpenRouter under the codename "Owl Alpha"

How these pages are produced

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