Grok 4 vs Claude Sonnet 5
Head-to-head specifications
| Metric | Grok 4 | Claude Sonnet 5 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence Index | 34.0 | 53.0 | -35.8% |
| Context window | 400K tokens | 1M tokens | — |
| Blended price ($/1M tokens) | $1.68 | $0.90 | +86.7% |
| Access | Proprietary API | Proprietary API | — |
- Claude Sonnet 5 leads overall capability (Intelligence Index 53.0 vs 34.0).
- Claude Sonnet 5 is the cheaper model to run at $0.90/1M blended tokens — about 1.9× cheaper.
- Claude Sonnet 5 offers the larger context window (1M tokens), useful for long documents and codebases.
Verdict: Grok 4 or Claude Sonnet 5?
Grok 4 advantages
- No decisive advantage on the tracked metrics.
Claude Sonnet 5 advantages
- General intelligence (+36%)
- Context window (+60%)
- Affordability (+46%)
Which should you choose?
- Choose the Claude Sonnet 5 if you need the strongest overall reasoning and accuracy.
Value for money
Claude Sonnet 5 offers more intelligence per dollar (2.9× the Intelligence-Index-per-cost of the alternative), making it the stronger value for high-volume use.
Grok 4 vs Claude Sonnet 5: which should you choose?
Grok 4 — xAI multimodal model with an Intelligence Index of 34, a 400K-token context window and a blended price of $1.68/1M tokens.
Claude Sonnet 5 — Anthropic multimodal model with an Intelligence Index of 53, a 1M-token context window and a blended price of $0.9/1M tokens.
Grok 4 vs Claude Sonnet 5: Claude Sonnet 5 scores higher on the Intelligence Index. Claude Sonnet 5 leads overall capability (Intelligence Index 53.0 vs 34.0). Claude Sonnet 5 is the cheaper model to run at $0.90/1M blended tokens — about 1.9× cheaper.
Capability: intelligence, coding and agentic work
On the composite Intelligence Index the Claude Sonnet 5 scores 53.0 versus 34.0. Composite indices summarize many evaluations, but always test on your own workload before committing.
Context window and speed
The Claude Sonnet 5 accepts up to 1 million tokens per request, which sets how much documentation, transcript or code it can reason over at once.
Pricing and access
At blended per-token rates, Claude Sonnet 5 is the cheaper model to run ($0.90 vs $1.68 per 1M tokens). Grok 4 is proprietary api and Claude Sonnet 5 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 Grok 4 better than the Claude Sonnet 5?
Claude Sonnet 5 is the clearly stronger overall choice, winning most of the dimensions that matter. Claude Sonnet 5 leads overall capability (Intelligence Index 53.0 vs 34.0).
What is the main difference between the Grok 4 and the Claude Sonnet 5?
Claude Sonnet 5 leads overall capability (Intelligence Index 53.0 vs 34.0). Claude Sonnet 5 is the cheaper model to run at $0.90/1M blended tokens — about 1.9× cheaper.
Which is better value?
Claude Sonnet 5 offers more intelligence per dollar (2.9× 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 5 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.