Model comparison

Claude Opus 4.6 vs Sonar

Claude Opus 4.6 is the stronger model overall, scoring 58.2 to 38.5 on the Noometry Index. Sonar costs 10× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 4.6's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Last verified . 0 shared benchmarks.

Claude Opus 4.6 Anthropic

58.2

Rank #20 Confirmed

Sonar Perplexity

38.5

Rank #187 Confirmed

Summary

  • The widest gap is in reasoning, where Claude Opus 4.6 leads 57.8 to 21.1.
  • Sonar is cheaper at $1 / $1 per million input/output tokens, against $5 / $25 for Claude Opus 4.6.
  • Claude Opus 4.6 accepts more context: 1M tokens versus 128K.

Side by side

Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonar specifications
Claude Opus 4.6Sonar
ProviderAnthropicPerplexity
Noometry Index58.238.5
Released2026-02-042024-01-01
WeightsProprietaryProprietary
Context window1M128K
Max output128K4K
Input $ / M tokens$5$1
Output $ / M tokens$25$1
Results tracked687

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Category by category

Coding Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 57.2 (#20), Sonar: 35.7 (#221)

Coding benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Sonar
SWE-bench Verified78.7%—
FrontierCode26.6%—
SWE-bench Verified (bash only)75.6%—
LMArena WebDev1547—
SWE-bench Multilingual72%—
GSO41.2%—
WeirdML78%—
LiveBench Coding—35.1%
LMArena Coding1536—
ALE-Bench996.5—
AlgoTune1.47—

Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable

Claude Opus 4.6: 51.1 (#4), Sonar: —

Agentic & Tool Use benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Sonar
Terminal-Bench79.8%—
APEX-Agents46.3%—
Remote Labor Index4.2%—
τ²-bench Banking27.3%—
Cybench93%—
DeepResearch Bench55.3%—
GBAEval44.1%—
LMArena Search1253—
METR Time Horizons78.9%—
Vending-Bench 28,018—

Reasoning Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 57.8 (#23), Sonar: 21.1 (#227)

Reasoning benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Sonar
ARC-AGI-269.2%—
SimpleBench67.6%—
Kagi LLM Benchmark83.6%—
NYT Connections (extended)92.1%—
ARC-AGI-194%—
Chess Puzzles17%—
EnigmaEval7.6%—
Thematic Generalization80.6%—
EBR-Bench12.7%—
LiveBench Reasoning—46.3%
LMArena Hard Prompts1527—
Mystery Game Puzzles25%—
DTBench91.2%—
LiveBench Data Analysis—37.9%
LMCA55.8%—
Epoch Capabilities Index155.24—
ForecastBench60—
LiveBench—46.9%

Math Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 63.0 (#31), Sonar: 33.7 (#200)

Knowledge Not comparable

Claude Opus 4.6: 61.9 (#26), Sonar: —

Knowledge benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Sonar
GPQA Diamond90.5%—
Humanity's Last Exam34.4%—
SimpleQA Verified47%—
Vectara Hallucination Rate12.2%—
LMArena Expert1546—

Multimodal Not comparable

Claude Opus 4.6: 37.3 (#74), Sonar: —

Multimodal benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Sonar
LMArena Vision1316—
Furniture Assembly28.3%—
LMArena Document1507—

Multilingual Not comparable

Claude Opus 4.6: 57.9 (#6), Sonar: —

Multilingual benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Sonar
LMArena Non-English1489—
LMArena Chinese1551—
LMArena French1513—
LMArena German1502—
LMArena Japanese1484—
LMArena Korean1464—
LMArena Russian1497—
LMArena Spanish1510—

Instruction Following Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 79.5 (#4), Sonar: 71.4 (#150)

Instruction Following benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Sonar
LiveBench Instruction Following—76.2%
LMArena Instruction Following1523—

Long Context Not comparable

Claude Opus 4.6: 48.1 (#13), Sonar: —

Long Context benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Sonar
CL-bench20.7%—
CL-bench Life17%—
LMArena Longer Query1520—

Writing & Preference Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 73.5 (#10), Sonar: 52.6 (#167)

Writing & Preference benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Sonar
LMArena Text1503—
LMArena Creative Writing1505—
EQ-Bench Creative Writing1809—
EQ-Bench 41223—
LMArena Multi-Turn1513—
LiveBench Language—44.1%

Frequently asked questions

Is Claude Opus 4.6 better than Sonar?

Claude Opus 4.6 is the stronger model overall, scoring 58.2 to 38.5 on the Noometry Index. Sonar costs 10× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 4.6's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.6 or Sonar?

Sonar is cheaper. It lists at $1 per million input tokens and $1 per million output tokens; Claude Opus 4.6 lists at $5 and $25.

Is Claude Opus 4.6 or Sonar better for coding?

Claude Opus 4.6 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 57.2 versus 35.7 in the Noometry coding category.

Which has the bigger context window?

Claude Opus 4.6 does, with 1M tokens against 128K.

How many benchmarks do Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonar share?

0 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Opus 4.6 has 68 scored results on Noometry and Sonar has 7.

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