Claude Opus 4.8 vs Llama 4
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Opus 4.8 is meaningfully stronger at coding (96 vs 72 on our capability index).
- •Llama 4 is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (82 vs 70).
- •Llama 4 is open-weights (free to self-host); Claude Opus 4.8 is paid API only.
- •Llama 4 has a Up to 10M tokens (Scout); ~1M tokens (Maverick) context window vs 1M - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Claude Opus 4.8 | Llama 4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Meta |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | 1M | ✓Up to 10M tokens (Scout); ~1M tokens (Maverick) |
| Input / 1M tokens | $5.00 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $25.00 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2026-05 | 2025-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Llama 4 |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 88.6% | - |
| SWE-bench Pro | 69.2% | - |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | 74.6% | - |
| GPQA Diamond | 93.6% | - |
| Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index | 61.4 | - |
| Scout context window | - | 10M tokens |
| Scout size | - | 17B active / 109B total (16 experts) |
| Maverick size | - | 17B active / 400B total (128 experts) |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose Claude Opus 4.8 if...
- →You need top-tier autonomous coding and multi-step agentic reliability
- →You run long-horizon agent traces that previously derailed after compaction
- →You want enterprise-grade reasoning with 1M context and 128k output
- →You need throughput and are willing to pay fast-mode premium for 2.5x speed
Choose Llama 4 if...
- →You need extremely long context in an open model (Scout's 10M window)
- →Self-hosted or on-prem multimodal deployment
- →You want an efficient MoE that activates few parameters per token
- →Fine-tuning or full control over the model