Claude Haiku 4 vs Claude Sonnet 4: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Claude Haiku 4 is significantly cheaper at $0.80/$4.00 per million tokens vs $3.00/$15.00. Claude Sonnet 4 is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1305 vs 1195. Claude Haiku 4 is faster at 130 tokens/sec vs 78 tokens/sec. Claude Sonnet 4 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1280 vs 1220.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureClaude Haiku 4Claude Sonnet 4
ProviderAnthropicAnthropic
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.800$3.00
Output Price / 1M tokens$4.00$15.00
Context Window200K200K
Max Output Tokens8,19264,000
Arena ELO1,2201,280
Coding ELO1,1951,305
TTFT (ms)150320
Tokens/sec13078
MultimodalYesYes
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesYes
When to Use Claude Haiku 4

Choose Claude Haiku 4 when you need: very fast response times, 200k context window, affordable for anthropic quality, good instruction following. It excels at chatbots, classification, cost-sensitive, high-volume tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

Strengths:

  • Very fast response times
  • 200K context window
  • Affordable for Anthropic quality
  • Good instruction following

Best for:

chatbotsclassificationcost-sensitivehigh-volume
When to Use Claude Sonnet 4

Choose Claude Sonnet 4 when you need: best-in-class coding performance, 200k context window, excellent instruction following. It excels at coding, analysis, long-context, agents tasks.

Strengths:

  • Best-in-class coding performance
  • 200K context window
  • Excellent instruction following

Best for:

codinganalysislong-contextagents

Frequently Asked Questions

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