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

Verdict

Claude Sonnet 4 is significantly cheaper at $3.00/$15.00 per million tokens vs $15.00/$75.00. Claude Opus 4 is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1360 vs 1305. Claude Sonnet 4 is faster at 78 tokens/sec vs 50 tokens/sec. Claude Opus 4 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1330 vs 1280.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureClaude Opus 4Claude Sonnet 4
ProviderAnthropicAnthropic
Input Price / 1M tokens$15.00$3.00
Output Price / 1M tokens$75.00$15.00
Context Window200K200K
Max Output Tokens32,00064,000
Arena ELO1,3301,280
Coding ELO1,3601,305
TTFT (ms)500320
Tokens/sec5078
MultimodalYesYes
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesYes
When to Use Claude Opus 4

Choose Claude Opus 4 when you need: top-tier coding and reasoning, excellent agentic capabilities, strong instruction following, 200k context window. It excels at coding, analysis, agents, complex-reasoning tasks.

Strengths:

  • Top-tier coding and reasoning
  • Excellent agentic capabilities
  • Strong instruction following
  • 200K context window

Best for:

codinganalysisagentscomplex-reasoning
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. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

Strengths:

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

Best for:

codinganalysislong-contextagents

Frequently Asked Questions

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