Claude 4.1 Opus vs Claude Sonnet 4.6
Head-to-head specifications
| Metric | Claude 4.1 Opus | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence Index | 30.0 | 47.0 | -36.2% |
| Context window | 262K tokens | 1M tokens | — |
| Blended price ($/1M tokens) | $1.68 | $1.20 | +40.0% |
| Output speed (tokens/s) | 30 | 54 | -44.4% |
| Access | Proprietary API | Proprietary API | — |
- Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads overall capability (Intelligence Index 47.0 vs 30.0).
- Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the cheaper model to run at $1.20/1M blended tokens — about 1.4× cheaper.
- Claude Sonnet 4.6 offers the larger context window (1M tokens), useful for long documents and codebases.
Verdict: Claude 4.1 Opus or Claude Sonnet 4.6?
Claude 4.1 Opus advantages
- No decisive advantage on the tracked metrics.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 advantages
- General intelligence (+36%)
- Context window (+74%)
- Affordability (+29%)
- Output speed (+44%)
Which should you choose?
- Choose the Claude Sonnet 4.6 if you need the strongest overall reasoning and accuracy.
Value for money
Claude Sonnet 4.6 offers more intelligence per dollar (2.2× the Intelligence-Index-per-cost of the alternative), making it the stronger value for high-volume use.
Claude 4.1 Opus vs Claude Sonnet 4.6: which should you choose?
Claude 4.1 Opus — Anthropic multimodal model with an Intelligence Index of 30, a 262K-token context window and a blended price of $1.68/1M tokens.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 — Anthropic multimodal model with an Intelligence Index of 47, a 1M-token context window and a blended price of $1.2/1M tokens.
Claude 4.1 Opus vs Claude Sonnet 4.6: Claude Sonnet 4.6 scores higher on the Intelligence Index. Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads overall capability (Intelligence Index 47.0 vs 30.0). Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the cheaper model to run at $1.20/1M blended tokens — about 1.4× cheaper.
Capability: intelligence, coding and agentic work
On the composite Intelligence Index the Claude Sonnet 4.6 scores 47.0 versus 30.0. Composite indices summarize many evaluations, but always test on your own workload before committing.
Context window and speed
The Claude Sonnet 4.6 accepts up to 1 million tokens per request, which sets how much documentation, transcript or code it can reason over at once. In measured throughput, Claude Sonnet 4.6 generates faster (54 vs 30 tokens/s), which matters for interactive apps and high-volume pipelines.
Pricing and access
At blended per-token rates, Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the cheaper model to run ($1.20 vs $1.68 per 1M tokens). Claude 4.1 Opus is proprietary api and Claude Sonnet 4.6 is proprietary api. Open-weight models can be self-hosted, trading per-call cost for infrastructure you manage; for production also weigh rate limits, throughput and data-residency requirements.
The verdict
Both are credible choices in the ai model comparison space; the specification table above lays out every metric so you can weigh the trade-offs that matter to you. Pick the one whose strengths line up with how you will actually use it.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Claude 4.1 Opus better than the Claude Sonnet 4.6?
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the clearly stronger overall choice, winning most of the dimensions that matter. Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads overall capability (Intelligence Index 47.0 vs 30.0).
What is the main difference between the Claude 4.1 Opus and the Claude Sonnet 4.6?
Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads overall capability (Intelligence Index 47.0 vs 30.0). Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the cheaper model to run at $1.20/1M blended tokens — about 1.4× cheaper.
Which is better value?
Claude Sonnet 4.6 offers more intelligence per dollar (2.2× the Intelligence-Index-per-cost of the alternative), making it the stronger value for high-volume use.
Which should I choose?
Choose the Claude Sonnet 4.6 if you need the strongest overall reasoning and accuracy.
Methodology
Large language models are compared on independent leaderboard metrics: an Intelligence Index (a composite of reasoning and knowledge evaluations), Coding and Agentic indices where measured, community arena Elo, maximum context window, a blended API price per million tokens (weighted across cache-hit, input and output rates), and measured output speed in tokens per second. Where a model ships multiple reasoning-effort variants, we report its strongest variant. Benchmarks capture only part of real-world quality, which also depends on tool use, latency, safety and task fit — and this space moves quickly, so figures reflect the leaderboard snapshot on the page date.