Sonar vs Qwen3-Max
Side-by-side specs, pricing and capabilities. Both models run on Clade under one subscription, so you can switch between them in the same conversation.
Sonar comes from Perplexity and Qwen3-Max from Alibaba. The practical difference for most people is context, price, and which input types each one accepts.
Qwen3-Max holds more in a single conversation — 256K tokens against 128K — which matters for long documents and large codebases.
Sonar is the cheaper of the two on input tokens at $1.00 / 1M tokens.
| Specification | Sonar | Qwen3-Max |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Perplexity | Alibaba |
| Model ID | sonar | qwen3-max |
| Context window | 128K | 256K |
| Max output | — | 80K |
| Input price | $1.00 / 1M tokens | $1.20 / 1M tokens |
| Output price | $1.00 / 1M tokens | $6.00 / 1M tokens |
| Knowledge cutoff | — | — |
| Input types | text, image, file | text |
| Output types | text | text |
| Plan | Free | Premium |
Which should you use?
Pick Sonar when…
- Cost matters: input runs at $1.00 / 1M tokens versus $1.20 / 1M tokens.
- You need image and file input, which the other model does not accept.
- You are on the free plan — this model is included without an upgrade.
Pick Qwen3-Max when…
- You need the larger context window — 256K against 128K.
- You want longer single responses — up to 80K output tokens.
Related comparisons
Try both on Clade
You do not have to choose. One Clade subscription gives you Sonar, Qwen3-Max, and every other model on the platform.