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

Verdict

Llama 4 Maverick is significantly cheaper at $0.20/$0.60 per million tokens vs $3.00/$15.00. Claude Sonnet 4 is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1305 vs 1280. Llama 4 Maverick offers a larger 1049K context window vs 200K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureClaude Sonnet 4Llama 4 Maverick
ProviderAnthropicMeta
Input Price / 1M tokens$3.00$0.200
Output Price / 1M tokens$15.00$0.600
Context Window200K1.048576M
Max Output Tokens64,00032,768
Arena ELO1,2801,290
Coding ELO1,3051,280
TTFT (ms)320250
Tokens/sec7890
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 Llama 4 Maverick

Choose Llama 4 Maverick when you need: open-source model with strong performance, very affordable via hosted providers, 1m context window, mixture-of-experts architecture. It excels at chatbots, coding, general-purpose, open-source tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two. Its 1049K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • Open-source model with strong performance
  • Very affordable via hosted providers
  • 1M context window
  • Mixture-of-experts architecture

Best for:

chatbotscodinggeneral-purposeopen-source

Frequently Asked Questions

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