Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Llama 4
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Sonnet 4.6 is meaningfully stronger at coding (85 vs 72 on our capability index).
- •Llama 4 is open-weights (free to self-host); Claude Sonnet 4.6 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 Sonnet 4.6 | Llama 4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Meta |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | 1M | ✓Up to 10M tokens (Scout); ~1M tokens (Maverick) |
| Input / 1M tokens | $3.00 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $15.00 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2026-02 | 2025-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Llama 4 |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 79.6% | - |
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 | 59.1% | - |
| OSWorld-Verified | 72.5% | - |
| GPQA | 79.7% | - |
| 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 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
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