Claude Opus 5.5 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6
Compare Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 side-by-side.
Compare Claude Opus 5.5 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6 live
Run the same image across every model that supports a task and compare their outputs side-by-side.
These models don't share enough common tasks for a side-by-side demo. See the comparison table below for their capabilities.
Models in this comparison
Claude Opus 5.5 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6 Comparison Table
Evals updated September 22, 2026Pricing updated September 22, 2026
| Property | Claude Opus 5.5 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| Organization | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| Category | closed | closed |
| Modality | multimodal | multimodal |
| Release Date | Sep 2026 | Feb 2026 |
| Context Window | 1.0M | 1.0M |
| Parameters | ||
| License | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Pricing per 1M tokens | ||
| Input $/1M | $4.00 | $3.00 |
| Output $/1M | $20.00 | $15.00 |
| Vision Tasks | ||
| Captioning | Demo | |
| Chart Question Answering | ||
| Classification | Demo | |
| Document Question Answering | ||
| Image Tagging | ||
| Multi-Label Classification | ||
| Object Detection | Demo | |
| OCR | Demo | |
| Vision Language | ||
| Visual Question Answering | Demo | |
| Model Features | ||
| Foundation Vision | ||
| LLMs with Vision Capabilities | ||
| Multimodal Vision | ||
Vision Evalsground-truth scores across 6 vision tasks, pooled at low effort | ||
| Overall | 85.5% | Not evaluated |
| Avg cost / sample | $0.014 | – |
| Avg speed / sample | 12.76s | – |
| By task | ||
| Object Detection (low) | 74.4% ±0.5, Mean of 3 runs, range 73.9 to 74.8 | – |
| Object Detection (high) | 76.8% ±1.2, Mean of 3 runs, range 75.4 to 77.8 | – |
| Counting (low) | 80.6% ±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 78.4 to 82.4 | – |
| Counting (high) | 82.0% ±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 79.7 to 83.8 | – |
| Identification (low) | 93.8% ±0.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 93.8 to 93.8 | – |
| Identification (high) | 95.8% ±1.6, Mean of 3 runs, range 93.8 to 96.9 | – |
| OCR (low) | 87.8% ±0.6, Mean of 3 runs, range 87.0 to 88.2 | – |
| OCR (high) | 87.2% ±0.6, Mean of 3 runs, range 86.5 to 87.8 | – |
| Data Extraction (low) | 93.5% ±0.5, Mean of 3 runs, range 92.8 to 93.8 | – |
| Data Extraction (high) | 93.5% ±0.5, Mean of 3 runs, range 92.8 to 93.8 | – |
| Reasoning (low) | 83.0% ±1.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 82.1 to 84.1 | – |
| Reasoning (high) | 85.9% ±2.6, Mean of 3 runs, range 82.8 to 88.1 | – |
Claude Opus 5.5 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6: Overview
Claude Opus 5.5 is a proprietary multimodal reasoning model from Anthropic and the first entry in the Claude 5.5 family. It accepts interleaved text and image input and returns text, with a one million token context window and up to 128,000 output tokens per response. Adaptive thinking is always enabled on this model and cannot be disabled; thinking depth is instead governed by an effort parameter with five levels, where medium is the default, a change from the high default used by Claude Opus 5 and earlier Opus models. Anthropic reports a knowledge cutoff of June 2026.
On the visual side, Anthropic characterizes Opus 5.5 as its strongest Opus release for vision and computer use, describing improved reading of dense documents, charts, screenshots, and diagrams for document extraction and visual analysis tasks. Published results include 89.0% on Chartography with tools and 81.8% on OSWorld 2.0 under partial credit scoring, alongside 48.7% under strict scoring reported in the system card. The accompanying system card states that Opus 5.5 scored higher than Opus 5 on every evaluation in its capability summary, with the largest gains concentrated in agentic coding, visual reasoning, computer use, and long-horizon knowledge work. The model ships with safety classifiers covering biology and cybersecurity that can route blocked requests to earlier Claude models.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is Anthropic's mid-tier large language model, released February 17, 2026, designed to balance performance, cost, and versatility for professional and developer use. It supports text and vision-based tasks with advanced reasoning, agentic capabilities, and Adaptive Thinking — a mode where the model dynamically scales its internal reasoning depth. A beta context window of up to 1,000,000 tokens (200K standard) enables processing of entire codebases or document collections in a single request. Parameters are undisclosed.
Optimized for coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, agent planning, and knowledge work, Sonnet 4.6 delivers a full generational upgrade over Sonnet 4.5 and approaches Opus 4.5-level performance across many benchmarks at a fraction of the cost. It is the default model on Claude.ai, Claude Cowork, and is available via API and major cloud platforms — making it well suited for production workloads requiring strong reasoning without flagship pricing.