Standard Compute
Model comparison 2026

Claude Haiku 5.5 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6

Claude Haiku 5.5
Anthropic · Budget · Proprietary
$0.22/1M · 1M ctx
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Anthropic · Balanced · Proprietary
$6.60/1M · 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 5.5
Sonnet 4.6
Maker
Anthropic
Anthropic
Blended price / 1M
$0.22
$6.60
Input / output
$0.10 in · $0.50 out / 1M tokens
$3.00 in · $15 out / 1M tokens
Context window
1M
1M
Open weights
No
No
Tool use
Yes
Yes
Reasoning
Yes
Yes
Output Quality
9.1
9.1
Agentic Ability
9.0
9.2
Speed
9.6
8.0
Value for money
9.4
8.0
Reliability
9.3
9.4

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

Verdict: Haiku 5.5 or Sonnet 4.6?

Updated 2026-10-13

Choose Claude Haiku 5.5 if you want subagents, routing and high-volume steps that stay under 100K tokens per request. Choose Claude Sonnet 4.6 if you want the everyday agent default — strong quality without the flagship price.

Editorially it's close: each model leads in 2 of our five dimensions. On price, Claude Haiku 5.5 runs about $0.22 per 1M tokens (blended) and is proprietary; Claude Sonnet 4.6 is about $6.60 and proprietary.

Where Haiku 5.5 falls short
  • Prompts over 100K tokens cost 5x, on the whole request
  • New tokenizer counts about 30% more tokens than Haiku 4.5 for the same text
Full Haiku 5.5 breakdown →
Where Sonnet 4.6 falls short
  • Still steps behind Opus on the very hardest tasks
  • Superseded by Claude Sonnet 5.5, which is cheaper ($2/$10) and much stronger
Full Sonnet 4.6 breakdown →

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