Claude Opus 4.8 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6: which is better?

Claude Opus 4.8 leads on combined benchmark scores (89.3 vs 86.5) across general knowledge, coding, and math, as of 2026-07-27.

Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.8 or Claude Sonnet 4.6?

Claude Sonnet 4.6 is cheaper on a typical API workload, at roughly 1.7x lower cost than the alternative at published per-token rates.

Claude Opus 4.8 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6

Claude Opus 4.8 leads on benchmarks; Claude Sonnet 4.6 is cheaper to run, about 1.7× less.

Updated 2026-07-27

Claude Opus 4.8

Anthropic · Closed

89.3

Combined index

Leads

Claude Sonnet 4.6

Anthropic · Closed

86.5

Combined index

Benchmarks

General knowledge (MMLU)

89.5

88.3

Coding

87.1

Math

92.4

84.2

API pricing

$5.0 Input / 1M $3.0

$25.0 Output / 1M $15.0

$225.0 Monthly, est. $135.0

Monthly estimate assumes 20M input + 5M output tokens. Prices marked ~ are representative hosted rates for open-weight models and vary by provider. Run your own numbers in the cost calculator.

Claude Opus 4.8 costs → Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs → Full leaderboard → All comparisons →