Claude Opus 4.8 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6
How Claude Opus 4.8 (Anthropic) and Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic) compare on price, context window and best-fit use case.
In short: Claude Opus 4.8 is best for Complex coding agents, long-horizon tasks, and workloads needing top reliability and reasoning, while Claude Sonnet 4.6 suits Everyday coding, agents, and production apps wanting Claude quality without flagship pricing. On price it's $5.00 vs $3.00 per 1M input tokens; on context, 1M tokens vs 1M tokens.
| Spec | Claude Opus 4.8 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| Developer | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| Context window | 1M tokens | 1M tokens |
| Input price /1M | $5.00 | $3.00 |
| Output price /1M | $25.00 | $15.00 |
| Modalities | text, image | text, image |
| Best for | Complex coding agents, long-horizon tasks, and workloads needing top reliability and reasoning. | Everyday coding, agents, and production apps wanting Claude quality without flagship pricing. |
Claude Opus 4.8
- Best-in-class coding and agentic tasks
- Adaptive reasoning with effort controls
- 1M context at flat rate
- Strong instruction following and safety
Claude Sonnet 4.6
- Strong coding at lower cost than Opus
- 1M context window
- Fast and reliable
- Excellent for agentic tooling