Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads on 2 of 2 shared benchmarks, including SWE-bench Verified (79.6% vs 73.3%), GPQA (79.7% vs 64.6%).
- •Claude Haiku 4.5 is meaningfully stronger at speed (98 vs 83 on our capability index).
- •Claude Sonnet 4.6 is meaningfully stronger at long context (90 vs 70).
- •Claude Haiku 4.5 is 67% cheaper on input tokens, which compounds fast on high-volume or agentic workloads.
- •Claude Sonnet 4.6 has a 1M context window vs 200K - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | 200K | ✓1M |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓$1.00 | $3.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $5.00 | $15.00 |
| Release date | 2025-10 | 2026-02 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Haiku 4.5 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 73.3% | ✓79.6% |
| GPQA | 64.6% | ✓79.7% |
| MMLU Pro | 80.0% | - |
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 | - | 59.1% |
| OSWorld-Verified | - | 72.5% |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose Claude Haiku 4.5 if...
- →You need high throughput and low latency at minimal cost
- →You are fanning out many parallel sub-agents or worker calls
- →You want solid coding/computer-use quality without Opus/Sonnet pricing
- →Your task fits comfortably within a 200K context window
Choose Claude Sonnet 4.6 if...
- →You have an existing integration pinned to Sonnet 4.6 and want stability
- →You need a proven mid-tier model with 1M context at $3/$15
- →You want predictable behavior without the new-tokenizer/thinking changes in Sonnet 5
- →You are cost-sensitive and don't need Sonnet 5's incremental gains