GPT-5 Mini vs Claude Haiku 4.5

OpenAI's GPT-5 Mini against Anthropic's Claude Haiku 4.5 — pricing, benchmarks, context, and best use cases compared side by side.

Last updated March 2026 · Compare other models
Quick Verdict

GPT-5 Mini leads on quality (Elo 1310 vs 1260) and is also 62% cheaper — a clear value winner. GPT-5 Mini offers a larger context window (400K vs 200K).

GPT-5 Mini
OpenAI
Claude Haiku 4.5
Anthropic
Input Price $0.25/1M $1.00/1M
Output Price $2.00/1M $5.00/1M
Blended Price $1.12/1M $3.00/1M
LMSYS Elo 1310 1260
Context Window 400,000 200,000
Provider OpenAI Anthropic

Pricing breakdown

When comparing LLM API pricing, GPT-5 Mini charges $0.25 per 1M input tokens compared to Claude Haiku 4.5's $1.00 — a 75% difference. For output tokens, GPT-5 Mini costs $2.00/1M versus $5.00/1M for Claude Haiku 4.5. On a blended basis (averaging input and output), GPT-5 Mini comes in at $1.12/1M tokens versus $3.00/1M for Claude Haiku 4.5.

Quality & benchmarks

On the LMSYS Chatbot Arena leaderboard — a crowd-sourced benchmark based on blind human preference voting — GPT-5 Mini scores 1310 Elo compared to Claude Haiku 4.5's 1260, a 50-point advantage. This is a substantial quality gap that will be noticeable across most tasks. GPT-5 Mini is best suited for budget-friendly general tasks, chatbots, and content generation, while Claude Haiku 4.5 is ideal for high-volume classification, extraction, and lightweight generation.

Context window comparison

GPT-5 Mini provides a significantly larger context window at 400K tokens compared to Claude Haiku 4.5's 200K tokens — 2.0x more capacity for processing long documents, large codebases, or extended conversations.

Monthly cost estimate

Adjust the sliders to see how costs compare for your workload.

GPT-5 Mini
per month
Claude Haiku 4.5
per month

Choose GPT-5 Mini if you need...

Extremely affordable
400K context at budget pricing
Good quality for the price tier

Choose Claude Haiku 4.5 if you need...

Low-cost Anthropic option
Fast response times
Good for high-volume simple tasks

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