Claude Opus 4.8 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6
List-price comparison ·Claude Opus 4.8 details ·Claude Sonnet 4.6 details
For a typical workload (100,000 requests / mo), Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the cheapest — 40% less than the priciest here ($960.00/mo vs $1,600.00/mo).
| Claude Opus 4.8 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | |
|---|---|---|
| Input / 1M tokens | $5.00 | $3.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $25.00 | $15.00 |
| Typical request (1,200 in + 400 out) | $0.016 | $0.0096 |
| Context window | 1M tokens | 1M tokens |
| Max output | 128k tokens | 128k tokens |
| Quality score | 97/100 | 88/100 |
| Tier | Flagship | Balanced |
| Provider | Anthropic | Anthropic |
Projected monthly cost
| Requests / mo | Claude Opus 4.8 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $16.00 | $9.60 |
| 10,000 | $160.00 | $96.00 |
| 100,000 | $1,600.00 | $960.00 |
Claude Opus 4.8
Best-in-class for complex multi-step agentic workflows, long-horizon planning, and large codebase refactors. Strong instruction-following on ambiguous, open-ended tasks.
Highest per-token cost in the catalog and noticeably higher latency — reserve for tasks that genuinely need top-tier reasoning rather than routine completions.
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Strong price-to-performance for production agents: reliable tool use, structured JSON output, and solid coding ability at roughly a fifth of Opus's cost.
Can still misstep on the hardest multi-step reasoning chains where Opus would succeed — budget for occasional escalation to a flagship model.
More comparisons
Vendor list rates · per-request examples assume 1,200 input + 400 output tokens.