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

Verdict

GPT-4.1 is significantly cheaper at $2.00/$8.00 per million tokens vs $3.00/$15.00. GPT-4.1 offers a larger 1048K context window vs 200K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureClaude Sonnet 4GPT-4.1
ProviderAnthropicOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$3.00$2.00
Output Price / 1M tokens$15.00$8.00
Context Window200K1.047576M
Max Output Tokens64,00032,768
Arena ELO1,2801,290
Coding ELO1,3051,320
TTFT (ms)320260
Tokens/sec7888
MultimodalYesYes
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesYes
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
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. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two. 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

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