Claude Opus 4.8 vs Claude Sonnet 5
How Claude Opus 4.8 (Anthropic) and Claude Sonnet 5 (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 5 suits Running AI agents affordably, multi-step automation, coding assistants and high-scale chat where you want near-flagship quality at lower cost. On price it's $5.00 vs $2.00 per 1M input tokens; on context, 1M tokens vs 1M tokens (verify — not yet published for Sonnet 5).
| Spec | Claude Opus 4.8 | Claude Sonnet 5 |
|---|---|---|
| Developer | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| Context window | 1M tokens | 1M tokens (verify — not yet published for Sonnet 5) |
| Input price /1M | $5.00 | $2.00 |
| Output price /1M | $25.00 | $10.00 |
| Modalities | text, image | text, image |
| Best for | Complex coding agents, long-horizon tasks, and workloads needing top reliability and reasoning. | Running AI agents affordably, multi-step automation, coding assistants and high-scale chat where you want near-flagship quality at lower cost. |
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 5
- Highly agentic (planning + autonomous tool/browser/terminal use)
- Strong agentic coding
- Near-Opus-4.8 quality at much lower cost
- Great for high-scale agents and chatbots