Which model is better: Claude 4.5 Sonnet or Claude 4 Opus?
Claude 4.5 Sonnet is 80.0% cheaper for input tokens ($3.00 vs. $15.00 per 1M tokens) and $15.00 vs. $75.00 for output tokens (5.0x cost advantage). In terms of operational performance, Claude 4.5 Sonnet delivers lower response latency at 380ms TTFT (540ms faster than Claude 4 Opus) with 84 vs. 46 tok/s throughput. Claude 4 Opus leads coding evaluations at 77.2% SWE-bench Verified vs. 75.8% for Claude 4.5 Sonnet and 87.1% vs. 84.2% on GPQA Diamond.
Verified daily via automated API latency tests and official documentation.
Zero-Shot RAG Verified
Verified Performance & Unit Economics Delta (12 Dimensions)
Daily synchronized metrics across token pricing, prompt cache economics, latency, throughput, and 5 capability benchmarks.
Metric / Dimension
Claude 4.5 Sonnet
Claude 4 Opus
Net Delta / Advantage
Input Cost / 1M Tokens
$3.00
$15.00
Claude 4.5 Sonnet is 5.0x cheaper
Output Cost / 1M Tokens
$15.00
$75.00
Claude 4.5 Sonnet (80.0% lower)
Prompt Cache Read / 1M
$0.300
$1.500
Claude 4.5 Sonnet is 5.0x cheaper
Prompt Cache Write / 1M
$3.75
$18.75
Claude 4.5 Sonnet is 5.0x cheaper
Context Window (Max Output)
205k (64k out)
205k (64k out)
Equal Context Window
Avg TTFT Response Latency
380ms
920ms
Claude 4.5 Sonnet (540ms faster)
Generation Speed (Throughput)
84 tok/s
46 tok/s
Claude 4.5 Sonnet (+38 tok/s faster)
SWE-bench Verified (Coding)
75.8%
77.2%
Claude 4 Opus (+1.4% lead)
GPQA Diamond (PhD STEM)
84.2%
87.1%
Claude 4 Opus (+2.9% lead)
MMLU-Pro (Multi-Discipline)
90.4%
91.8%
Claude 4 Opus (+1.4% lead)
MATH-500 (Quantitative Logic)
97.5%
98.1%
Claude 4 Opus (+0.6% lead)
Inference Value Score (IVR)
56.5 / 100
43.6 / 100
Claude 4.5 Sonnet (+12.9 pts)
Interactive Monthly Token Economics & ROI Forecaster
Model production workloads across prompt, completion, and cached context tokens, or switch models on the fly.
Which is cheaper: Claude 4.5 Sonnet or Claude 4 Opus?
Claude 4.5 Sonnet is cheaper at $3.00/1M input tokens ($15.00/1M output) compared to $15.00/1M input ($75.00/1M output) for Claude 4 Opus.
Which model has lower TTFT latency and higher tok/s throughput: Claude 4.5 Sonnet or Claude 4 Opus?
Claude 4.5 Sonnet delivers faster first-token latency at 380ms TTFT (84 tok/s throughput) compared to 920ms TTFT (46 tok/s) for Claude 4 Opus.
How do Claude 4.5 Sonnet and Claude 4 Opus compare on SWE-bench coding and GPQA Diamond reasoning?
On SWE-bench Verified software engineering, Claude 4.5 Sonnet scores 75.8% versus 77.2% for Claude 4 Opus. On GPQA Diamond graduate-level STEM reasoning, Claude 4.5 Sonnet scores 84.2% versus 87.1% for Claude 4 Opus (and 97.5% vs 98.1% on MATH-500).
When should you choose Claude 4.5 Sonnet?
Choose Claude 4.5 Sonnet (Anthropic) for end-to-end autonomous coding agents, complex multi-file debugging, browser/GUI automation, and high-precision technical writing — offering a 204k context window, 380ms TTFT, and $3.00/1M input pricing ($0.300/1M cached reads).
When should you choose Claude 4 Opus?
Choose Claude 4 Opus (Anthropic) for mission-critical R&D, long-horizon autonomous coding tasks, complex theorem proving, and executive strategic synthesis — offering a 204k context window, 920ms TTFT, and $15.00/1M input pricing ($1.500/1M cached reads).
