llm model
Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Claude Opus 4.6
Sonnet and Opus are the two most commonly-chosen Claude models. Opus is stronger on the hardest tasks; Sonnet is roughly 5× cheaper and faster for the same request.
Contender A
Claude Sonnet 4.6
The production workhorse
Contender B
Claude Opus 4.6
The maximum-capability tier
Side-by-side comparison
Metric
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Claude Opus 4.6
Price (input)
$3 / 1M tok
$15 / 1M tok
Latency
Fast
Slower
SWE-Bench
~70%
~74%
Best for
Agents + production
Deep research + hard reasoning
When Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the right pick
90% of production workloads — cheaper, faster, only slightly behind Opus.
When Claude Opus 4.6 is the right pick
Evaluation, research, the highest-stakes single prompts where accuracy > cost.
Verdict
Default to Sonnet. Reach for Opus on the hardest ~10% of prompts where the quality delta is worth the 5× cost.
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