Claude Opus 5.5 vs Claude Sonnet 5
Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 5 score 82.0% vs 55.3% averaged across five Vision Evals tasks (#4 and #49 of 65 models), so Claude Opus 5.5 leads overall.
- Claude Opus 5.5 wins all 5 tasks, with its widest lead on reasoning (83.0% vs 43.0%).
- Claude Sonnet 5 is about half the cost: $0.0074 vs $0.015 overall average cost per sample.
- Claude Sonnet 5 is faster: 5.9s vs 7.6s per sample.
Roboflow Vision Evals. Full breakdown below.
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Claude Opus 5.5 vs Claude Sonnet 5 on Vision Evals
Roboflow Vision Evals. Full breakdown below.
Claude Opus 5.5 vs Claude Sonnet 5 Comparison Table
Evals updated October 26, 2026Pricing updated November 6, 2026
| Property | Claude Opus 5.5 | Claude Sonnet 5 |
|---|---|---|
| Organization | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| Category | closed | closed |
| Modality | multimodal | multimodal |
| Release Date | Sep 2026 | Jun 2026 |
| Context Window | 1.0M | 1.0M |
| Parameters | Unknown | Unknown |
| License | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Commercial use | commercial use per vendor terms | commercial use per vendor terms |
| Pricing per 1M tokens | ||
| Input $/1M | $4.00 | $2.00 |
| Output $/1M | $20.00 | $10.00 |
| Vision Tasks | ||
| Model Features | ||
Both support 3 more features | ||
Vision Evalsground-truth scores across 5 vision tasks, pooled at low effort | ||
| Overall | 82.0% | 55.3% |
| Avg cost / sample | $0.015 | $0.0074 |
| Avg speed / sample | 7.63s | 5.86s |
| By task | ||
| Object Detection (low) | 74.5% ±0.5, Mean of 3 runs, range 74.0 to 75.0 | 36.1% |
| Object Detection (high) | 76.0% ±1.1, Mean of 3 runs, range 74.7 to 77.0 | – |
| Counting (low) | 80.6% ±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 78.4 to 82.4 | 56.8% |
| 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 | 81.3% |
| Identification (high) | 95.8% ±1.6, Mean of 3 runs, range 93.8 to 96.9 | – |
| OCR (low) | 78.3% | 59.4% |
| by category |
|
|
| OCR (high) | 79.9% | 59.5% |
| by category |
|
|
| Reasoning (low) | 83.0% ±1.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 82.1 to 84.1 | 43.0% |
| Reasoning (high) | 85.9% ±2.6, Mean of 3 runs, range 82.8 to 88.1 | 43.0% |
Claude Opus 5.5 vs Claude Sonnet 5: 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. 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 5 is a mid-tier large language model from Anthropic, released on June 30, 2026, as the latest model in the Sonnet series and a direct successor to Claude Sonnet 4.6. It is a hybrid reasoning model designed primarily for agentic workflows, software coding, and professional tasks. The model features a 1 million token context window, a 128k maximum output token limit, and runs adaptive thinking by default, giving API users fine-grained control over reasoning effort across five levels (low, medium, high, max, and extra-high). It uses an updated tokenizer shared with Opus 4.7 and later models, which produces approximately 30% more tokens for equivalent text compared to earlier Claude models.
The model supports text and image input with text output, and accepts tools including browsers and terminals for autonomous multi-step task execution. Anthropic's safety evaluations report that Sonnet 5 shows a lower rate of undesirable behaviors than Sonnet 4.6 and is generally safer in agentic contexts, with improved resistance to prompt injection and reduced sycophancy. Cybersecurity safeguards equivalent to those on Opus 4.7 and 4.8 are active, though Anthropic notes the model was not deliberately trained on cybersecurity tasks. The model is proprietary and API-only, with no open weights.
Frequently Asked Questions
On Roboflow's Vision Evals, Claude Opus 5.5 performed better. It scores higher on all five vision tasks and averages 82.0% (#4 of 65) against 55.3% (#49 of 65) for Claude Sonnet 5. These scores measure vision capabilities only; either model may perform differently on work outside this benchmark's tasks.
Yes. On the Vision Evals Reasoning benchmark at low effort, Claude Opus 5.5 leads with 83.0% against 43.0%. This is the widest gap between the two models across the benchmark's tasks.
Claude Sonnet 5 is cheaper to run. Across Roboflow's Vision Evals task mix it averaged $0.0074 per sample against $0.015. Claude Opus 5.5 is priced at $4.00 per 1M input tokens and $20.00 per 1M output; Claude Sonnet 5 is priced at $2.00 per 1M input tokens and $10.00 per 1M output. Actual costs depend on your image sizes, prompts, and output length.
Claude Sonnet 5 is faster. Across Roboflow's Vision Evals it averaged 5.9s per inference against 7.6s. Latency varies with image size, prompt length, and provider load, so treat these as relative rather than guaranteed figures.
Yes. The comparison demo on this page runs both models on the same image side by side for image captioning and OCR in the free Roboflow Playground. You can try it instantly, and a free account unlocks unlimited runs.