Model crosswalk
Side-by-side on price, capability and workload. Both columns use the cheapest provider for that model.
Llama 3.3 70b Instruct
vs
Qwen 3 72b Instruct
Llama 3.3 70b InstructA
Llama 3.3 70b Instruct
Cheapest provider—
$/1M input—
$/1M output—
Qwen 3 72b InstructB
Qwen 3 72b Instruct
Cheapest provider—
$/1M input—
$/1M output—
Specs and cheapest providers
| Spec | Llama 3.3 70b Instruct | Qwen 3 72b Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| Parameters | — | — |
| Context window | — | — |
| License | — | — |
| Released | — | — |
| Cheapest provider | ||
| Provider | — | — |
| Input / 1M tokens | — | — |
| Output / 1M tokens | — | — |
#9 Llama 3.3 70B Instruct in cheapest input#5 Qwen 3 72B Instruct in cheapest output#8 Llama 3.3 70B Instruct in cheapest output#4 Llama 3.3 70B Instruct in fastest TTFT#10 Qwen 3 72B Instruct in fastest TTFT#3 Llama 3.3 70B Instruct in highest throughput#10 Qwen 3 72B Instruct in highest throughput#1 Llama 3.3 70B Instruct in best MMLU#1 Llama 3.3 70B Instruct in best HumanEval
Benchmark comparison
No benchmark data available for either model yet.
Sample workload — 5M in + 2M out per month
using each model's cheapest providerWhat changes at scale
Output tokens dominate cost above a 1:3 input/output ratio. Below 1:1, input dominates and cheaper-input providers win regardless of headline price.
1M in · 250K out$0.00 · $0.00
5M in · 2M out$0.00 · $0.00
20M in · 10M out$0.00 · $0.00
100M in · 60M out$0.00 · $0.00
Capability vs price
scatter// scatter: benchmark × $/1M out
Calculate cost for your workload
Compare total monthly cost across providers for Llama 3.3 70b Instruct and Qwen 3 72b Instruct using your own input/output token mix.
Open workload calculator →Editor's take
## Llama 3.3 70B Instruct vs Qwen 3 72B Instruct
Both models are sub-$1/1M tokens at most providers — a meaningful floor for 70B-class inference. [Llama 3.3 70B Instruct](/models/meta--llama-3.3-70b-instruct) runs $0.20–$0.40/1M tokens; [Qwen 3 72B Instruct](/models/alibaba--qwen-3-72b-instruct) is priced comparably at $0.25–$0.50/1M tokens. The decision comes down to language coverage and benchmark profile, not cost.
Llama 3.3 has stronger instruction-following on English MMLU — it scores above 90% on IFEval and consistently outperforms Qwen 3 72B on English-language instruction benchmarks by 3–5 points. Meta's RLHF pipeline is particularly well-tuned for English conversational tasks and structured output generation.
Qwen 3 72B has measurably better multilingual performance across CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) and Arabic. On multilingual MMLU and language-specific benchmarks, Qwen 3 72B leads by 6–12 points in these language families. For any application with significant non-English traffic, that gap directly affects end-user quality.
**Where Llama 3.3 70B wins:** English-only or English-primary applications — customer support, document processing, code assistance — where instruction fidelity and refusal calibration matter. Provider coverage is broader, simplifying redundancy planning.
**Where Qwen 3 72B wins:** Multilingual products serving CJK or Arabic markets, translation pipelines, and content moderation over non-English corpora. The multilingual training depth is reflected in output coherence, not just benchmark numbers.
Pick Llama 3.3 70B for English-first workloads. Pick Qwen 3 72B if your user base is meaningfully multilingual or CJK/Arabic-primary.
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Full model details