Claude Haiku 4 vs GPT-4.1: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Claude Haiku 4 is significantly cheaper at $0.80/$4.00 per million tokens vs $2.00/$8.00. GPT-4.1 is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1320 vs 1195. Claude Haiku 4 is faster at 130 tokens/sec vs 88 tokens/sec. GPT-4.1 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1290 vs 1220. GPT-4.1 offers a larger 1048K context window vs 200K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureClaude Haiku 4GPT-4.1
ProviderAnthropicOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.800$2.00
Output Price / 1M tokens$4.00$8.00
Context Window200K1.047576M
Max Output Tokens8,19232,768
Arena ELO1,2201,290
Coding ELO1,1951,320
TTFT (ms)150260
Tokens/sec13088
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 GPT-4.1

Choose GPT-4.1 when you need: 1m token context window, excellent coding performance, strong instruction following, competitive pricing for its capability. It excels at coding, long-context, agents, general-purpose tasks. Its 1048K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • 1M token context window
  • Excellent coding performance
  • Strong instruction following
  • Competitive pricing for its capability

Best for:

codinglong-contextagentsgeneral-purpose

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Comparisons