Claude Opus 5 vs Claude Opus 4.8
How Claude Opus 5 (Anthropic) and Claude Opus 4.8 (Anthropic) compare on price, context window and best-fit use case.
In short: Claude Opus 5 is best for frontier-grade reasoning, deep agents and hard coding work where you want Fable-5-class quality without Fable-5 pricing, while Claude Opus 4.8 suits complex coding agents, long-horizon tasks, and workloads needing top reliability and reasoning. On price it's $5.00 vs $5.00 per 1M input tokens; on context, 1M tokens (128K max output) vs 1M tokens.
Verdict
Claude Opus 5 is the more capable pick (Bq score 97 vs 93). Choose Claude Opus 4.8 if its fit is closer to your workload: complex coding agents, long-horizon tasks, and workloads needing top reliability and reasoning.
| Spec | Claude Opus 5 | Claude Opus 4.8 |
|---|---|---|
| Developer | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| Context window | 1M tokens (128K max output) | 1M tokens |
| Input price /1M | $5.00 | $5.00 |
| Output price /1M | $25.00 | $25.00 |
| Modalities | text, image | text, image |
| Best for | Frontier-grade reasoning, deep agents and hard coding work where you want Fable-5-class quality without Fable-5 pricing. | Complex coding agents, long-horizon tasks, and workloads needing top reliability and reasoning. |
Claude Opus 5
- Near-Fable-5 frontier intelligence at half the price
- Same $5/$25 pricing as Opus 4.8, no premium for the upgrade
- 1M-token context window
- Strong agentic and long-horizon coding work
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