# Claude Opus 4.5 vs Claude Sonnet 5

> Side-by-side benchmark comparison for Claude Opus 4.5 and Claude Sonnet 5 across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, multilingual, and math tasks.

- Canonical page: https://benchlm.ai/compare/claude-opus-4-5-vs-claude-sonnet-5
- Last updated: September 29, 2026

- Shared sourced benchmarks: 6
- HTML indexing: indexable
- Ranking lane: BenchAlign v5.7

## Quick Verdict

Pick Claude Sonnet 5 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude Opus 4.5 only makes more sense when its price, context window, or workload-specific category wins matter more than the overall score.

## Summary

- Claude Sonnet 5 leads overall 66.72 to 54.89.
- The clearest category separation is in multimodal & grounded, where the averages are 24.5 for Claude Opus 4.5 and 78.4 for Claude Sonnet 5.
- The biggest single benchmark swing is HLE in Knowledge, with scores of 30.8% and 57.4%.
- Claude Sonnet 5 is the cheaper option on output tokens, which matters if you expect large responses or heavy interactive use.
- Claude Sonnet 5 also has the larger context window at 1M.

## Model Snapshot

| Property | Claude Opus 4.5 | Claude Sonnet 5 |
|----------|----------|----------|
| Creator | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| Type | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Reasoning | Non-Reasoning | Reasoning |
| Context | 200K | 1M |
| Overall Score | 54.89 | 66.72 |
| Benchmarks Covered | 45 | 26 |
| Pricing (input/output) | $5.00 / $25.00 | $2.00 / $10.00 |

## Category Breakdown

### Agentic

- Winner: Directional only
- Claude Opus 4.5 public-lane score: 31.2 (Estimated · #78/117)
- Claude Sonnet 5 public-lane score: 64.6 (Supported · #13/117)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.5 | Claude Sonnet 5 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 | 59.3% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| OSWorld-Verified | 66.3% | 81.2% | Claude Sonnet 5 |
| OSWorld | 66.3% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Claw-Eval | 59.6% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| QwenClawBench | 52.3% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| τ³-bench results | 70.2% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| VITA-Bench | 23.3% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| DeepPlanning | 26.4% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Toolathlon | 43.5% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| MCP Atlas | 42.3% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| MCP-Tasks | 71.8% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| WideResearch | 76.4% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| CyberGym | 50.6% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Gert Labs | 64.23% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| JobBench | 32.3% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Terminal-Bench 3.0 | Coming soon | 14.6% | Coming soon |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | Coming soon | 80.4% | Coming soon |
| BrowseComp | Coming soon | 84.7% | Coming soon |
| HLE w/ tools | Coming soon | 57.4% | Coming soon |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Vals) | Coming soon | 74.5% | Coming soon |
| ApprenticeBench | Coming soon | 16% | Coming soon |

### Coding

- Winner: Directional only
- Claude Opus 4.5 public-lane score: 42.6 (Estimated · #56/143)
- Claude Sonnet 5 public-lane score: 60 (Supported · #20/143)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.5 | Claude Sonnet 5 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| SWE-bench Verified | 80.9% | 85.2% | Claude Sonnet 5 |
| LiveCodeBench v6 | 84.8% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| SWE-bench Pro | 57.1% | 63.2% | Claude Sonnet 5 |
| SWE Multilingual | 77.5% | 78.3% | Claude Sonnet 5 |
| NL2Repo | 43.2% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| SWE Multimodal | Coming soon | 28.1% | Coming soon |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | Coming soon | 80.4% | Coming soon |
| FrontierCode 1.1 Main | Coming soon | 42.7% | Coming soon |
| cursorBench32 | Coming soon | 61.5% | Coming soon |
| VulcanBench CII v1 | Coming soon | 89.2% | Coming soon |
| LiveCodeBench (Vals) | Coming soon | 82.4% | Coming soon |
| SWE-bench (Vals) | Coming soon | 79.6% | Coming soon |
| cursorBench40 | Coming soon | 34.1% | Coming soon |

### Reasoning

- Winner: Not comparable
- Claude Opus 4.5 public-lane score: 73.3 (Unranked · 4 rankable rows)
- Claude Sonnet 5 public-lane score: 78.7 (Unranked · 2 rankable rows)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.5 | Claude Sonnet 5 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| LongBench v2 | 64.4% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| AI-Needle | 74% | Coming soon | Coming soon |

### Multimodal & Grounded

- Winner: Directional only
- Claude Opus 4.5 public-lane score: 24.5 (#48/50)
- Claude Sonnet 5 public-lane score: 78.4 (#15/50)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.5 | Claude Sonnet 5 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| MMMU-Pro | 70.6% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| MathVision | 74.3% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| CharXiv | 68.5% | 88.3% | Claude Sonnet 5 |
| VideoMMMU | 84.4% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| ScreenSpot Pro | 45.7% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| V* | 67.0% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| CharXiv w/o tools | Coming soon | 77% | Coming soon |

### Knowledge

- Winner: Directional only
- Claude Opus 4.5 public-lane score: 49.3 (Estimated · #62/169)
- Claude Sonnet 5 public-lane score: 64.2 (Supported · #27/169)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.5 | Claude Sonnet 5 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| GPQA | 87% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| SuperGPQA | 70.6% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| MMLU-Pro | 89.5% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| MMLU-Redux | 96.6% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| C-Eval | 92.2% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| HLE | 30.8% | 57.4% | Claude Sonnet 5 |
| HLE w/o tools | Coming soon | 43.2% | Coming soon |
| HLE-Verified | Coming soon | 31.0% | Coming soon |
| LABBench2 | Coming soon | 80.1% | Coming soon |
| GPQA Diamond (Vals) | Coming soon | 88.9% | Coming soon |
| MMLU-Pro (Vals) | Coming soon | 87.5% | Coming soon |

### Multilingual

- Winner: Not comparable
- Claude Opus 4.5 public-lane score: 82.9 (#2/12)
- Claude Sonnet 5 public-lane score: Coming soon

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.5 | Claude Sonnet 5 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| MMLU-ProX | 85.7% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| NOVA-63 | 56.7% | Coming soon | Coming soon |

### Instruction Following

- Winner: Not comparable
- Claude Opus 4.5 public-lane score: 30.6 (#114/124)
- Claude Sonnet 5 public-lane score: Coming soon

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.5 | Claude Sonnet 5 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| IFEval | 90.9% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| IFBench | 58% | Coming soon | Coming soon |

### Mathematics

- Winner: Not comparable
- Claude Opus 4.5 public-lane score: 57.9 (#6/7)
- Claude Sonnet 5 public-lane score: Coming soon

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.5 | Claude Sonnet 5 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| AIME26 | 95.1% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| HMMT Feb 2025 | 92.9% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| HMMT Nov 2025 | 93.3% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| HMMT Feb 2026 | 85.3% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| MMAnswerBench | 84.0% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| FrontierMath v2 (Tiers 1-3) | 20.690% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| FrontierMath v2 (Tier 4) | 4.167% | Coming soon | Coming soon |

## FAQ

### Which is better overall, Claude Opus 4.5 or Claude Sonnet 5?

Claude Sonnet 5 is ahead overall on BenchLM right now.

### Where is the biggest gap between Claude Opus 4.5 and Claude Sonnet 5?

The widest category gap is in multimodal & grounded, where the averages are 24.5 for Claude Opus 4.5 and 78.4 for Claude Sonnet 5.

### How many benchmarks does Claude Opus 4.5 cover on BenchLM?

Claude Opus 4.5 currently has 45 sourced benchmark scores on BenchLM.

### How many benchmarks does Claude Sonnet 5 cover on BenchLM?

Claude Sonnet 5 currently has 26 sourced benchmark scores on BenchLM.

## Related Comparisons

- [Claude Opus 4.5 vs Claude Opus 4.5 Thinking](/compare/claude-opus-4-5-vs-claude-opus-4-5-thinking)
- [Claude Sonnet 5 vs Claude Opus 4.5 Thinking](/compare/claude-opus-4-5-thinking-vs-claude-sonnet-5)
- [Claude Opus 4.5 vs GPT-6 Astra](/compare/claude-opus-4-5-vs-gpt-6-astra)
- [Claude Sonnet 5 vs GPT-6 Astra](/compare/claude-sonnet-5-vs-gpt-6-astra)

## Explore More

- [Claude Opus 4.5 profile](/models/claude-opus-4-5)
- [Claude Sonnet 5 profile](/models/claude-sonnet-5)
- [Compare Pricing](/llm-pricing)
- [Alternative Finder](/tools/alternative-finder)
- [LLM Selector](/tools/llm-selector)
- [Overall Rankings](/best/overall)