Standard Compute
Model comparison 2026

Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Claude Sonnet 5.5

Claude Haiku 4.5
Anthropic · Budget · Proprietary
$2.20/1M · 200K ctx
Claude Sonnet 5.5
Anthropic · Balanced · Proprietary
$4.40/1M · 1M ctx

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
Haiku 4.5
Sonnet 5.5
Maker
Anthropic
Anthropic
Blended price / 1M
$2.20
$4.40
Input / output
$1.00 in · $5.00 out / 1M tokens
$2.00 in · $10 out / 1M tokens
Context window
200K
1M
Open weights
No
No
Tool use
Yes
Yes
Reasoning
Yes
Yes
Output Quality
8.2
9.8
Agentic Ability
8.2
9.8
Speed
9.0
8.4
Value for money
8.3
8.8
Reliability
9.3
9.4

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

Verdict: Haiku 4.5 or Sonnet 5.5?

Updated 2026-10-13

Choose Claude Haiku 4.5 if you want cheap, fast subtasks and subagents inside a larger workflow. Choose Claude Sonnet 5.5 if you want the everyday default for coding agents, escalating to Opus 5.5 only for the hardest tasks.

In our editorial scoring, Claude Sonnet 5.5 leads in 4 of five dimensions (output quality, agentic ability, value for money and reliability), while Claude Haiku 4.5 leads in 1. On price, Claude Haiku 4.5 runs about $2.20 per 1M tokens (blended) and is proprietary; Claude Sonnet 5.5 is about $4.40 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 5.5 falls short
  • Artificial Analysis flags it as very verbose, which adds output tokens
  • Released September 2026, so its long-run track record is still short
Full Sonnet 5.5 breakdown →

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