Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs GPT-5
2026 - Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Sonnet 4.6 is 70% cheaper on input tokens - better for high-volume workloads.
- •Claude Sonnet 4.6 has a 200K context window - 2x larger than GPT-5's 128K. Better for long documents and large codebases.
Specs comparison
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | GPT-5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | OpenAI |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓200K | 128K |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓$3.00 | $10.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $15.00 | $30.00 |
| Release date | 2025-07 | 2025-06 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | GPT-5 |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | ~49% | - |
| MMLU | ~88% | - |
| HumanEval | ~93% | - |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts.
Strengths
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
GPT-5
- ✓Strong general-purpose reasoning
- ✓Excellent multimodal understanding
- ✓Broad domain knowledge
- ✓Consistent instruction following
- ✓Widely supported by third-party tools
Which should you choose?
Choose Claude Sonnet 4.6 if you need...
- →Production API integrations
- →Coding assistants and IDEs
- →Document analysis
- →Agentic workflows
Choose GPT-5 if you need...
- →General-purpose API integrations
- →Multimodal applications
- →Complex reasoning tasks
- →Enterprise deployments