Claude Opus 4 vs Grok 3: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Grok 3 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 1290. Grok 3 is faster at 80 tokens/sec vs 50 tokens/sec. Claude Opus 4 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1330 vs 1300. Claude Opus 4 offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureClaude Opus 4Grok 3
ProviderAnthropicxAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$15.00$3.00
Output Price / 1M tokens$75.00$15.00
Context Window200K128K
Max Output Tokens32,00016,384
Arena ELO1,3301,300
Coding ELO1,3601,290
TTFT (ms)500300
Tokens/sec5080
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. Its 200K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

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

Best for:

codinganalysisagentscomplex-reasoning
When to Use Grok 3

Choose Grok 3 when you need: strong benchmark performance, good reasoning capabilities, vision and multimodal support, fast for its capability tier. It excels at general-purpose, reasoning, coding tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

Strengths:

  • Strong benchmark performance
  • Good reasoning capabilities
  • Vision and multimodal support
  • Fast for its capability tier

Best for:

general-purposereasoningcoding

Frequently Asked Questions

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