StepFun: Step 5 Preview vs Cohere: Command A+
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-10-09.
| StepFun: Step 5 Preview | Cohere: Command A+ | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | stepfun | cohere |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 74.2 | 17.4 |
| Input Price | $1.00/M | $0.30/M |
| Output Price | $2.70/M | $1.50/M |
| Context Window | 1,000,000 | 192,000 |
| Max Output | 64,000 | 64,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 72.2 | 21.7 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Command A+ costs $0.68 and Step 5 Preview costs $1.68, so Command A+ is about 2.5 times cheaper for the same work.
Step 5 Preview reads up to 1,000,000 tokens at once, roughly 1,500 pages of text, against about 288 pages for Command A+.
Only Step 5 Preview offers video input.
On our blended benchmark score Step 5 Preview leads 74.2 to 17.4.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Step 5 Preview scores higher on 16 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others), Command A+ on 4 (Code Completion, JSON Extraction, Bulk Data Labeling and others).
Step 5 Preview was released in October 2026 and Command A+ in September 2026.
Pick Step 5 Preview if you need long documents, video input, benchmark performance or the stronger all-round task scores; pick Command A+ if you need lower cost.
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 | StepFun: Step 5 Preview | Cohere: Command A+ |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 142 | 132 |
| Code Review | 145 | 127 |
| Code Completion | 120 | 127 |
| Code Refactoring | 147 | 127 |
| Bug Fixing | 149 | 131 |
| Unit Test Generation | 132 | 122 |
| Code Documentation | 137 | 125 |
| Regex Writing | 126 | 121 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 128 | 118 |
| Frontend Component Design | 130 | 124 |
| Data Analysis | 134 | 127 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 136 | 126 |
| ETL Scripting | 138 | 122 |
| JSON Extraction | 123 | 131 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 120 | 129 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 134 | 127 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 134 | 127 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 149 | 128 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 118 | 124 |
| Blog Post Writing | 130 | 120 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →