Anthropic Claude Opus 4.8 VS Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5
Decision Recommendation
⚖️ Editorial Verdict: In our analysis, Claude Opus 4.8 is the premium intelligence choice, scoring 6.0% higher on coding benchmarks. However, this accuracy premium comes with a cost overhead: Claude Sonnet 5 is 2.5x cheaper to run. If you are building high-volume, simple chatbots or processing massive amounts of text where budget is critical, Claude Sonnet 5 offers excellent cost savings. For agentic reasoning, code refactoring, or complex logical tasks, the accuracy premium of Claude Opus 4.8 fully justifies the cost.
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Model Specs
Claude Opus 4.8
Benchmarks & Scores
Coding (swe-bench-pro)Winner (+6.0%)
69.2%excellent at multi-file repositories, autonomous agents, and industrial codebases
Reasoning (gpqa-diamond)
93.6%graduate-level science QA
Cost & Performance
Cost (per 1M tokens)
$10.00Input: $5.00 | Output: $25.00Context Window
1M tokensModel Specs
Claude Sonnet 5
Benchmarks & Scores
Coding (swe-bench-pro)
63.2%excellent at multi-file repositories, autonomous agents, and industrial codebases
Reasoning (gpqa-diamond)
N/Agraduate-level science QA
Cost & Performance
Cost (per 1M tokens)2.5x cheaper
$4.00Input: $2.00 | Output: $10.00Context WindowLarger
1.05M tokensFrequently Asked Questions about Claude Opus 4.8 vs Claude Sonnet 5 comparison
Claude Sonnet 5 is cheaper than Claude Opus 4.8. Claude Sonnet 5 has a blended cost of $4.00/1M tokens, which is about 2.5x cheaper than Claude Opus 4.8 at $10.00/1M tokens.
Claude Opus 4.8 is better for coding tasks on this benchmark. It scores 69.2% on swe-bench-pro (excellent at multi-file repositories, autonomous agents, and industrial codebases) compared to Claude Sonnet 5 which scores 63.2%.
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