Is Claude Fable 5 cheaper than Claude Opus 4.8?

Claude Opus 4.8 is cheaper: roughly $11 vs $22 per 1M tokens (blended). Claude Fable 5: $10 in · $50 out / 1M tokens. Claude Opus 4.8: $5.00 in · $25 out / 1M tokens.

Can I switch between Claude Fable 5 and Claude Opus 4.8 in the same agent?

Yes. Model-agnostic agents (Cline, Aider, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, Kilo Code, OpenCode) let you swap models per task. Many people route hard tasks to the stronger model and routine work to the cheaper one.

Claude Fable 5 vs Claude Opus 4.8: Which Is Better? (2026)

Q: Claude Fable 5 vs Claude Opus 4.8: which is better for agents?

Claude Fable 5 scores higher on output quality (9.0/10 vs 8.0/10), while Claude Opus 4.8 is the cheaper option. Claude Fable 5 is best for existing Fable 5 setups that have not yet moved to Fable 5.1 or Opus 5.5; Claude Opus 4.8 is best for existing Opus 4.8 setups until they move to Opus 5.5. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Community vote

Pick a winner in each dimension. You can change your vote any time.

Output Quality

Correctness and depth of what it produces

Agentic Ability

Tool calls, instruction-following, and multi-step tasks

Speed

Tokens per second and time-to-first-token

Value for Money

How much capability you get per dollar

Reliability

Consistent results: fewer refusals, loops and format breaks

Specs and pricing side by side

Spec

Fable 5

Opus 4.8

Maker

Anthropic

Blended price / 1M

$22

$11

Input / output

$10 in · $50 out / 1M tokens

$5.00 in · $25 out / 1M tokens

Context window

Open weights

Tool use

Yes

Reasoning

Yes

Output Quality

9.0

8.0

Agentic Ability

8.3

6.7

Speed

6.8

6.7

Value for Money

4.1

4.3

Reliability

9.4

8.9

Pricing and capabilities synced from the OpenRouter catalogue. Scores are editorial (0–10).

Verdict: Fable 5 or Opus 4.8?

Updated 2026-10-16

Choose Claude Fable 5 if you want existing Fable 5 setups that have not yet moved to Fable 5.1 or Opus 5.5. Choose Claude Opus 4.8 if you want existing Opus 4.8 setups until they move to Opus 5.5.

In our editorial scoring, Claude Fable 5 leads in 4 of five dimensions (output quality, agentic ability, speed and reliability), while Claude Opus 4.8 leads in 1. On price, Claude Fable 5 runs about $22 per 1M tokens (blended) and is proprietary; Claude Opus 4.8 is about $11 and proprietary.

Where Fable 5 falls short

Superseded by Fable 5.1, and Opus 5.5 outscores both
Cache reads cost $1 per million, four times Fable 5.1's

Full Fable 5 breakdown →

Where Opus 4.8 falls short

Superseded by Claude Opus 5.5, which costs less ($4/$20 vs $5/$25) and scores far higher
Haiku 5.5 now scores higher on Artificial Analysis (43 vs 42) at a fraction of the price

Full Opus 4.8 breakdown →

Current Claude, GPT, Gemini and open models run on Standard Compute

Standard Compute

Current frontier models Claude Fable 5.1 · GPT-6 Astra