Standard Compute
Model comparison 2026

Claude Haiku 5.5 vs Grok 4.20

Claude Haiku 5.5
Anthropic · Budget · Proprietary
$0.22/1M · 1M ctx
Grok 4.20
xAI · Frontier · Proprietary
$1.63/1M · 2M 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
Grok 4.20
Maker
Anthropic
xAI
Blended price / 1M
$0.22
$1.63
Input / output
$0.10 in · $0.50 out / 1M tokens
$1.25 in · $2.50 out / 1M tokens
Context window
1M
2M
Open weights
No
No
Tool use
Yes
Yes
Reasoning
Yes
Yes
Output Quality
9.1
8.6
Agentic Ability
9.0
8.0
Speed
9.6
7.6
Value for money
9.4
8.5
Reliability
9.3
8.5

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

Verdict: Haiku 5.5 or Grok 4.20?

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 Grok 4.20 if you want agents that genuinely need 2M tokens of context.

In our editorial scoring, Claude Haiku 5.5 leads in 5 of five dimensions (output quality, agentic ability, speed, value for money and reliability), while Grok 4.20 leads in 0. On price, Claude Haiku 5.5 runs about $0.22 per 1M tokens (blended) and is proprietary; Grok 4.20 is about $1.63 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 Grok 4.20 falls short
  • Big context costs add up fast
  • Smaller ecosystem than GPT/Claude
Full Grok 4.20 breakdown →

The agent matters as much as the model. Compare AI agents →

Current Claude, GPT, Gemini and open models are included with Standard Compute

Standard Compute

Current frontier models Claude Opus 5.5 · Claude Sonnet 5.5

Your agents never stop.
Your bill never grows.

Frontier models when it counts. Efficient models when it doesn’t. The most intelligence per dollar. One flat bill.

Plans from $19/mo · cancel anytime · 7-day fair refund

7-day fair refund No credit card needed Billing by Stripe1,800+ agent users

Related comparisons