Head-to-head comparison across 3benchmark categories. Overall scores shown here use BenchLM's provisional ranking lane.
Claude Sonnet 4.6
85
Kimi K2.5
68
Verified leaderboard positions: Claude Sonnet 4.6 unranked · Kimi K2.5 #9
Pick Claude Sonnet 4.6 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Kimi K2.5 only becomes the better choice if you want the cheaper token bill or you need the larger 256K context window.
Agentic
+10.7 difference
Coding
+2.2 difference
Knowledge
+8.6 difference
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Kimi K2.5
$3 / $15
$0.5 / $2.8
44 t/s
45 t/s
1.48s
2.38s
200K
256K
Pick Claude Sonnet 4.6 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Kimi K2.5 only becomes the better choice if you want the cheaper token bill or you need the larger 256K context window.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 85 to 68. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
Claude Sonnet 4.6's sharpest advantage is in agentic, where it averages 65.3 against 54.6. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is SuperGPQA, 95% to 69.2%.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is also the more expensive model on tokens at $3.00 input / $15.00 output per 1M tokens, versus $0.50 input / $2.80 output per 1M tokens for Kimi K2.5. That is roughly 5.4x on output cost alone. Kimi K2.5 gives you the larger context window at 256K, compared with 200K for Claude Sonnet 4.6.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is ahead on BenchLM's provisional leaderboard, 85 to 68. The biggest single separator in this matchup is SuperGPQA, where the scores are 95% and 69.2%.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 73.7 versus 65.1. Inside this category, SuperGPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 66.4 versus 64.2. Inside this category, SWE-bench Verified is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 65.3 versus 54.6. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Estimates at 50,000 req/day · 1000 tokens/req average.
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