Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5 vs Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.8 (batch)
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5 | Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.8 (batch) | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | anthropic | anthropic |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 91.4 | 93.7 |
| Input Price | $2.00/M | $2.50/M |
| Output Price | $10.00/M | $12.50/M |
| Context Window | 1,000,000 | 1,000,000 |
| Max Output | 128,000 | 128,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 88.0 | 91.9 |
| ai_index_agentic | 77.0 | 77.8 |
| ai_index_coding | 100.0 | 100.0 |
| eqbench | - | 74.2 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Claude Sonnet 5 costs $4.50 and Claude Opus 4.8 (batch) costs $5.62, so Claude Sonnet 5 is about 1.2 times cheaper for the same work.
Both read up to 1,000,000 tokens at once, roughly 1,500 pages of text.
On our blended benchmark score Claude Opus 4.8 (batch) leads 93.7 to 91.4.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Claude Sonnet 5 scores higher on 2 (JSON Extraction, Bulk Data Labeling), Claude Opus 4.8 (batch) on 18 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Completion and others).
Claude Sonnet 5 was released in June 2026 and Claude Opus 4.8 (batch) in May 2026.
Pick Claude Sonnet 5 if you need lower cost; pick Claude Opus 4.8 (batch) if you need benchmark performance or the stronger all-round task scores.
Costs use current list prices per million tokens; page counts assume about 0.75 words per token and 500 words per page.
Who wins by task?
| Task | Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5 | Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.8 (batch) |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 171 | 176 |
| Code Review | 167 | 177 |
| Code Completion | 119 | 121 |
| Code Refactoring | 164 | 174 |
| Bug Fixing | 180 | 190 |
| Unit Test Generation | 154 | 160 |
| Code Documentation | 141 | 147 |
| Regex Writing | 135 | 137 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 144 | 150 |
| Frontend Component Design | 146 | 150 |
| Data Analysis | 171 | 176 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 153 | 158 |
| ETL Scripting | 154 | 162 |
| JSON Extraction | 138 | 138 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 124 | 123 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 146 | 149 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 146 | 149 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 159 | 169 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 122 | 123 |
| Blog Post Writing | 140 | 145 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →