Claude 4.1 Opus vs Claude Sonnet 5

Pick Claude Sonnet 5 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude 4.1 Opus only becomes the better choice if coding is the priority or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.

Claude Sonnet 5 is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 94 to 51. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Claude 4.1 Opus is also the more expensive model on tokens at $15.00 input / $75.00 output per 1M tokens, versus $3.00 input / $15.00 output per 1M tokens for Claude Sonnet 5. That is roughly 5.0x on output cost alone. Claude Sonnet 5 is the reasoning model in the pair, while Claude 4.1 Opus is not. That usually helps on harder chain-of-thought-heavy tests, but it can also mean more latency and more token spend in real use. Claude Sonnet 5 gives you the larger context window at 1M, compared with 200K for Claude 4.1 Opus.