Claude Opus 4.6 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 Sonnet 4.6
- · Claude Opus 4.6: Highest hit rate on SWE-bench among closed-source models
- · Claude Sonnet 4.6: Best-in-class for code refactoring and multi-step pull requests
Spec comparison
| Spec | Claude Opus 4.6 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | anthropic | anthropic |
| Input per 1M tokens | $5.00 / 1M | $3.00 / 1M |
| Output per 1M tokens | $25.00 / 1M | $15.00 / 1M |
| Context window | 200,000 tok | 200,000 tok |
| Max output | 32,000 tok | 64,000 tok |
| Knowledge cutoff | 2025-07 | 2025-07 |
| Vision | ||
| Tool calling | ||
| Structured output | ||
| Reasoning |
Claude Opus 4.6 — strengths
- +Highest hit rate on SWE-bench among closed-source models
- +Excellent at multi-day agentic tasks without drift
- +Top performance on multi-repo code analysis
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 Opus 4.6 — weaknesses
- −Substantially pricier per token than Sonnet — rarely worth the markup
- −Higher latency, especially with extended thinking enabled
Claude Sonnet 4.6 — weaknesses
- −Knowledge cutoff July 2025 — no recent web knowledge
- −No native JSON mode — schema enforcement via tool-call trick