Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Llama 4
2026 - Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Llama 4 is open-weights - free to self-host with no API costs. Claude Haiku 4.5 requires paid API access.
- •Llama 4 has a 10M context window - 50x larger than Claude Haiku 4.5's 200K. Better for long documents and large codebases.
- •Llama 4 is open-source: fine-tune it, self-host it, or use any inference provider. Claude Haiku 4.5 is closed-source.
Specs comparison
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | Llama 4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Meta |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | 200K | ✓10M |
| Input / 1M tokens | $0.80 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $4.00 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2025-10 | 2025-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Haiku 4.5 | Llama 4 |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU | ~82% | ~85% |
| HumanEval | ~88% | - |
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
Llama 4
- ✓Fully open weights - no usage restrictions
- ✓10M context in Llama 4 Scout variant
- ✓Native multimodal support
- ✓Strong performance relative to size
- ✓Enormous ecosystem of community tools and fine-tunes
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 Llama 4 if you need...
- →Self-hosted and on-premise deployments
- →Privacy-sensitive workloads
- →Custom fine-tuning
- →Researchers and open-source builders