Claude Opus 4.6 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6 Comparison
Compare Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 with Claude Sonnet 4.6. Intelligence vs efficiency analysis.
Quick Summary
Claude Sonnet 4.6 offers better performance than Opus at a fraction of the cost, making it the better choice for most use cases.
Winner: Claude Sonnet 4.6
Pricing Comparison
Claude Opus 4.6
Input
$5/1M tokens
Output
$25/1M tokens
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Input
$3/1M tokens
Output
$15/1M tokens
Key Differences
- Claude Sonnet 4.6 is 5x cheaper than Opus
- Claude Sonnet 4.6 is faster
- Claude Opus 4.6 has slightly better reasoning on complex tasks
- Claude Sonnet 4.6 has more recent training data
- Both have 200K context windows
Best Use Cases
Claude Opus 4.6
- Extremely complex reasoning
- Research applications
- When cost is not a concern
- Maximum quality requirements
- Complex mathematical proofs
Claude Sonnet 4.6
- Production applications
- Business use cases
- Content creation
- Code generation
- Most AI applications