Pick a winner in each dimension — change your vote anytime.
Pricing and capabilities synced from the OpenRouter catalogue. Scores are editorial (0–10).
Choose Claude Opus 4.8 if you want hard, high-stakes coding and reasoning where quality matters more than cost. Choose Claude Sonnet 4.6 if you want the everyday agent default — strong quality without the flagship price.
In our editorial scoring, Claude Opus 4.8 leads in 3 of five dimensions (output quality, agentic ability and reliability), while Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads in 2. On price, Claude Opus 4.8 runs about $11 per 1M tokens (blended) and is proprietary; Claude Sonnet 4.6 is about $6.60 and proprietary.
The model picks the moves; the agent runs the loop, the tools, and the guardrails. Once you've chosen a model, see which agent gets the most out of it.