Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6

Direct comparison between anthropic and anthropic for chat models. Specs, prices, strengths, weaknesses — decide on facts.

At a glance

  • · Cheaper: Claude Haiku 4.5
  • · Claude Haiku 4.5: Very cheap per million tokens — good for bulk workloads
  • · Claude Sonnet 4.6: Best-in-class for code refactoring and multi-step pull requests

Spec comparison

SpecClaude Haiku 4.5Claude Sonnet 4.6
Provideranthropicanthropic
Input per 1M tokens$1.00 / 1M$3.00 / 1M
Output per 1M tokens$5.00 / 1M$15.00 / 1M
Context window200,000 tok200,000 tok
Max output8,192 tok64,000 tok
Knowledge cutoff2025-072025-07
Vision
Tool calling
Structured output
Reasoning

Claude Haiku 4.5 — strengths

  • +Very cheap per million tokens — good for bulk workloads
  • +Low latency, comparable to Gemini 3 Flash
  • +Vision-capable — rare in this price tier

Claude Sonnet 4.6 — strengths

  • +Best-in-class for code refactoring and multi-step pull requests
  • +Very stable tool-use loops — low hallucination on arguments
  • +64k output tokens fit whole files in one response

Claude Haiku 4.5 — weaknesses

  • Weaker on multi-step reasoning than Sonnet
  • Only 8k output tokens — no full files in one response

Claude Sonnet 4.6 — weaknesses

  • Knowledge cutoff July 2025 — no recent web knowledge
  • No native JSON mode — schema enforcement via tool-call trick
Details: Claude Haiku 4.5Details: Claude Sonnet 4.6