Model Comparison 2026

Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6

Claude Haiku 4.5
Anthropic · Budget · Proprietary
$2.20/1M · 200K ctx
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Anthropic · Balanced · Proprietary
$6.60/1M · 1M ctx

Community Vote

Pick a winner in each dimension — change your vote anytime.

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 $
How much capability you get per dollar
Reliability
Consistent results — fewer refusals, loops, and format breaks

Specs & Pricing, Side by Side

Spec
Haiku 4.5
Sonnet 4.6
Maker
Anthropic
Anthropic
Blended price / 1M
$2.20
$6.60
Input / output
$1.00 in · $5.00 out / 1M tokens
$3.00 in · $15 out / 1M tokens
Context window
200K
1M
Open weights
No
No
Tool use
Yes
Yes
Reasoning
Yes
Yes
Output Quality
8.2
9.1
Agentic Ability
8.2
9.2
Speed
9.0
8.0
Value for $
8.3
8.0
Reliability
9.3
9.4

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

Verdict: Haiku 4.5 or Sonnet 4.6?

Updated 2026-06-22

Choose Claude Haiku 4.5 if you want cheap, fast subtasks and subagents inside a larger workflow. Choose Claude Sonnet 4.6 if you want the everyday agent default — strong quality without the flagship price.

In our editorial scoring, Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads in 3 of five dimensions (output quality, agentic ability and reliability), while Claude Haiku 4.5 leads in 2. On price, Claude Haiku 4.5 runs about $2.20 per 1M tokens (blended) and is proprietary; Claude Sonnet 4.6 is about $6.60 and proprietary.

Where Haiku 4.5 falls short
  • Quality well below Sonnet/Opus on hard tasks
  • 200K context, not 1M
Full Haiku 4.5 breakdown →
Where Sonnet 4.6 falls short
  • Still steps behind Opus on the very hardest tasks
  • Pricier than open-weight models of similar quality
Full Sonnet 4.6 breakdown →

The model is half the story — the agent is the other half

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