Claude 4 Sonnet vs Phi-4

Side-by-side benchmark comparison across knowledge, coding, math, and reasoning.

Claude 4 Sonnet is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 67 to 39. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Claude 4 Sonnet's sharpest advantage is in multilingual, where it averages 84 against 80.6. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is HumanEval, 65 to 82.6. Phi-4 does hit back in coding, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

Claude 4 Sonnet gives you the larger context window at 200K, compared with 16K for Phi-4.

Quick Verdict

Pick Claude 4 Sonnet if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Phi-4 only becomes the better choice if coding is the priority.

Knowledge

Phi-4

Claude 4 Sonnet

62.2

Phi-4

70.5

73
MMLU
84.8
73
GPQA
56.1
71
SuperGPQA
-
69
OpenBookQA
-
75
MMLU-Pro
-
12
HLE
-

Coding

Phi-4

Claude 4 Sonnet

50.7

Phi-4

82.6

65
HumanEval
82.6
51
SWE-bench Verified
-
36
LiveCodeBench
-

Mathematics

Claude 4 Sonnet
73
AIME 2023
-
75
AIME 2024
-
74
AIME 2025
-
69
HMMT Feb 2023
-
71
HMMT Feb 2024
-
70
HMMT Feb 2025
-
72
BRUMO 2025
-
81
MATH-500
-

Reasoning

Claude 4 Sonnet
71
SimpleQA
-
69
MuSR
-
82
BBH
-

Instruction Following

Claude 4 Sonnet
83
IFEval
-

Multilingual

Claude 4 Sonnet

Claude 4 Sonnet

84

Phi-4

80.6

84
MGSM
80.6

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better, Claude 4 Sonnet or Phi-4?

Claude 4 Sonnet is ahead overall, 67 to 39. The biggest single separator in this matchup is HumanEval, where the scores are 65 and 82.6.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Claude 4 Sonnet or Phi-4?

Phi-4 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 70.5 versus 62.2. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Claude 4 Sonnet or Phi-4?

Phi-4 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 82.6 versus 50.7. Inside this category, HumanEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multilingual tasks, Claude 4 Sonnet or Phi-4?

Claude 4 Sonnet has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 84 versus 80.6. Inside this category, MGSM is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 9, 2026

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