Model comparison 2026

Claude Haiku 5.5 vs Kimi K2.6

Claude Haiku 5.5
Anthropic · Budget · Proprietary
$0.22/1M · 1M ctx
Kimi K2.6
Moonshot AI · Frontier · Open weights
$1.48/1M · 262K 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
Kimi K2.6
Maker
Anthropic
Moonshot AI
Blended price / 1M
$0.22
$1.48
Input / output
$0.10 in · $0.50 out / 1M tokens
$0.65 in · $3.41 out / 1M tokens
Context window
1M
262K
Open weights
No
Yes
Tool use
Yes
Yes
Reasoning
Yes
Yes
Output Quality
9.1
8.6
Agentic Ability
9.0
8.8
Speed
9.6
7.6
Value for money
9.4
9.2
Reliability
9.3
9.0

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

Verdict: Haiku 5.5 or Kimi K2.6?

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 Kimi K2.6 if you want a flagship-feel open-weight generalist.

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 Kimi K2.6 leads in 0. On price, Claude Haiku 5.5 runs about $0.22 per 1M tokens (blended) and is proprietary; Kimi K2.6 is about $1.48 and open-weight.

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 Kimi K2.6 falls short
  • A step behind the closed flagships
  • Pricier than the cheapest open models
Full Kimi K2.6 breakdown →

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