Head-to-head comparison across 1benchmark categories. Overall scores shown here use BenchLM's provisional ranking lane.
Claude Haiku 4.5
56
Claude Sonnet 5
94
Pick Claude Sonnet 5 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude Haiku 4.5 only becomes the better choice if coding is the priority or you want the cheaper token bill.
Coding
+10.1 difference
Claude Haiku 4.5
Claude Sonnet 5
$1 / $5
$3 / $15
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
200K
1M
Pick Claude Sonnet 5 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude Haiku 4.5 only becomes the better choice if coding is the priority or you want the cheaper token bill.
Claude Sonnet 5 is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 94 to 56. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
Claude Sonnet 5 is also the more expensive model on tokens at $3.00 input / $15.00 output per 1M tokens, versus $1.00 input / $5.00 output per 1M tokens for Claude Haiku 4.5. That is roughly 3.0x on output cost alone. Claude Sonnet 5 is the reasoning model in the pair, while Claude Haiku 4.5 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 Haiku 4.5.
Claude Sonnet 5 is ahead on BenchLM's provisional leaderboard, 94 to 56.
Claude Haiku 4.5 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 73.3 versus 63.2. Claude Sonnet 5 stays close enough that the answer can still flip depending on your workload.
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