GPT-4o vs Claude Sonnet 4.6
OpenAI's GPT-4o against Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.6 — pricing, benchmarks, context, and best use cases compared side by side.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads on quality (Elo 1385 vs 1285), while GPT-4o compensates with 31% lower pricing. Claude Sonnet 4.6 offers a larger context window (1M vs 128K).
| Input Price | $2.50/1M | $3.00/1M |
| Output Price | $10.00/1M | $15.00/1M |
| Blended Price | $6.25/1M | $9.00/1M |
| LMSYS Elo | 1285 | 1385 |
| Context Window | 128,000 | 1,000,000 |
| Provider | OpenAI | Anthropic |
Pricing breakdown
When comparing LLM API pricing, GPT-4o charges $2.50 per 1M input tokens compared to Claude Sonnet 4.6's $3.00 — a 17% difference. For output tokens, GPT-4o costs $10.00/1M versus $15.00/1M for Claude Sonnet 4.6. On a blended basis (averaging input and output), GPT-4o comes in at $6.25/1M tokens versus $9.00/1M for Claude Sonnet 4.6.
Quality & benchmarks
On the LMSYS Chatbot Arena leaderboard — a crowd-sourced benchmark based on blind human preference voting — Claude Sonnet 4.6 scores 1385 Elo compared to GPT-4o's 1285, a 100-point advantage. This is a substantial quality gap that will be noticeable across most tasks. Claude Sonnet 4.6 is best suited for everyday AI tasks, coding, writing, and analysis at mid-tier pricing, while GPT-4o is ideal for production apps needing stability and multimodal capabilities.
Context window comparison
Claude Sonnet 4.6 provides a significantly larger context window at 1M tokens compared to GPT-4o's 128K tokens — 7.8x more capacity for processing long documents, large codebases, or extended conversations. With 1M tokens, Claude Sonnet 4.6 can handle entire books, repositories, or multi-document analysis in a single prompt.
Monthly cost estimate
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