Claude Opus vs Claude Sonnet
The one most Claude users get wrong by defaulting up. Sonnet 5 handles the large majority of real work at a fraction of Opus 5's price, with the same million-token context. Opus earns its cost on long autonomous runs and architectural reasoning — not on the routine edits people usually point it at.
| Claude Opus | Claude Sonnet | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| Current release | Opus 5 | Sonnet 5 |
| Tier | Frontier | Balanced |
| Context | 1M | 1M |
| Cost | Premium | Moderate |
| Modalities | text, vision | text, vision |
| Open weights | No | No |
Cost is a tier, not a quote — providers change prices often. Check Anthropic and Anthropic before you commit. Last updated 2026-08-14.
Which one to pick
Claude OpusAnthropic · Opus 5
Agentic coding and multi-step engineering work — near the ceiling, at half the price
Reach for it when- Long agent runs with no human in the loop
- Architecture decisions and gnarly debugging
Claude SonnetAnthropic · Sonnet 5
The default for most work — reads code like a senior engineer at a fair price
Reach for it when- Day-to-day coding, editing and refactoring
- Anything you run at volume
Related comparisons
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- Claude Sonnet vs GPT-5.6 TerraThe workhorse tier, where most production traffic actually runs.
- Claude Sonnet vs Gemini ProA tier-crossing comparison people make on price.
- Claude Fable vs Claude OpusThe within-Claude question.