Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6
2026 - Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Haiku 4.5 is 73% cheaper on input tokens - better for high-volume workloads.
- •Both models come from Anthropic. Claude Haiku 4.5 targets higher capability; Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the faster, cheaper tier.
Specs comparison
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | 200K | 200K |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓$0.80 | $3.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $4.00 | $15.00 |
| Release date | 2025-10 | 2025-07 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Haiku 4.5 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU | ~82% | ~88% |
| HumanEval | ~88% | ~93% |
| SWE-bench Verified | - | ~49% |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts.
Strengths
Claude Haiku 4.5
- ✓Lowest latency in the Claude lineup
- ✓Extremely cost-effective at scale
- ✓Strong at classification and extraction
- ✓Good at following structured output schemas
- ✓Handles 200K context at low cost
Claude Sonnet 4.6
- ✓Strong coding and debugging across most languages
- ✓Excellent at following multi-step instructions
- ✓200K context handles entire codebases
- ✓Fast enough for interactive use cases
- ✓Solid function calling and structured output
Which should you choose?
Choose Claude Haiku 4.5 if you need...
- →High-volume API pipelines
- →Real-time classification
- →Form and document extraction
- →Low-latency chatbots
Choose Claude Sonnet 4.6 if you need...
- →Production API integrations
- →Coding assistants and IDEs
- →Document analysis
- →Agentic workflows