Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs GPT-4o: Detailed Comparison
Choosing between Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic) and
GPT-4o (OpenAI) comes down to three things:
per-token pricing, context window, and which capability matters most for your workload.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs $3.00/M input vs
$2.50/M for GPT-4o;
context windows are 200K vs
128K tokens. Detailed breakdown below.
Side-by-side specs
| Spec | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | GPT-4o |
|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | OpenAI |
|---|
| Released | 2026-03-12 | 2024-05-13 |
|---|
| Input price |
$3.00/M |
$2.50/M |
| Output price |
$15.00/M |
$10.00/M |
| Cached input |
$0.3000/M |
$1.2500/M |
| Context window |
200K |
128K |
| Max output |
64K |
16K |
| Modalities |
text image |
text image audio |
| Tokenizer |
claude-3 |
o200k_base |
Capability matrix
| Capability | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | GPT-4o |
|---|
| function calling |
Yes |
Yes |
| json mode |
Yes |
Yes |
| vision |
Yes |
Yes |
| streaming |
Yes |
Yes |
| tool use |
Yes |
No |
| audio |
No |
Yes |
Benchmark comparison
Higher is better for all benchmarks shown.
Per-call cost on typical workloads
| Workload (in/out tokens) | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | GPT-4o | Cheaper by |
|---|
| Standard chat (1K / 500) |
$0.010500 |
$0.007500 |
GPT-4o by $0.003000 |
| RAG (4K / 500) |
$0.019500 |
$0.015000 |
GPT-4o by $0.004500 |
| Long doc (20K / 1K) |
$0.075000 |
$0.060000 |
GPT-4o by $0.015000 |
| Very long context (100K / 2K) |
$0.322500 |
$0.265000 |
GPT-4o by $0.057500 |
When to choose Claude Sonnet 4.6 over GPT-4o
- Larger context window (200K vs 128K) — relevant when whole documents or long histories must fit in a single call.
- Supports tool use — GPT-4o does not.
When to choose GPT-4o over Claude Sonnet 4.6
- Per-token input cost is 17% lower than Claude Sonnet 4.6.
- Supports audio — Claude Sonnet 4.6 does not.
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