Head-to-head comparison across 1benchmark categories. Overall scores shown here use BenchLM's provisional ranking lane.
Claude 4 Sonnet
50
Claude Sonnet 5
94
Pick Claude Sonnet 5 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude 4 Sonnet 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.
Coding
+9.5 difference
Claude 4 Sonnet
Claude Sonnet 5
$3 / $15
$3 / $15
40 t/s
N/A
1.33s
N/A
200K
1M
Pick Claude Sonnet 5 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude 4 Sonnet 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 50. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
Claude Sonnet 5 is the reasoning model in the pair, while Claude 4 Sonnet 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 Sonnet.
Claude Sonnet 5 is ahead on BenchLM's provisional leaderboard, 94 to 50.
Claude 4 Sonnet has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 72.7 versus 63.2. Claude Sonnet 5 stays close enough that the answer can still flip depending on your workload.
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