Home/Compare/Claude Sonnet 5 vs Claude Opus 5
Updated 2026-09-11 20:18 UTC
Head-to-Head Specification Battle

Claude Sonnet 5 vs Claude Opus 5

Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.

Core Technical & Pricing Comparison
MetricClaude Sonnet 5Claude Opus 5Advantage
Provider OrganizationAnthropicAnthropic
Standard Input / 1M$3.00$15.00Claude Sonnet 5 (80% lower)
Cached Input / 1M$0.20$0.50Claude Sonnet 5 lower
Output / 1M$15.00$75.00Claude Sonnet 5 lower
Context Window200k200kEqual
Max Generation Tokens16.4k16.4kClaude Sonnet 5
Tokenizer FamilyAnthropic Claude BPE (~65k vocabulary)Anthropic Claude BPE (~65k vocabulary)

Interactive Side-by-Side Cost Simulator

Live Delta
Input Tokens / Req2,500
Output Tokens / Req800
Daily Requests10,000
Claude Sonnet 5LOWER COST
$4,800.00 / month
$0.0160 / request
Claude Opus 5
$23,812.50 / month
$0.0794 / request
Selecting Claude Sonnet 5 saves $19,012.50 / month (79.8% savings) over Claude Opus 5.

When to Choose Claude Sonnet 5

Opt for Claude Sonnet 5 when your engineering requirements prioritize Anthropic's ecosystem, specific tokenizer efficiencies (Calibrated Claude Tokenizer (±3%)), or when your expected prompt-to-completion ratios favor its $3/M input rate.

When to Choose Claude Opus 5

Opt for Claude Opus 5 when looking for Anthropic's tooling integration, specific context window depth (200k tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $75/M rate.