# Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs Grok 4.6

> Side-by-side benchmark comparison for Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Grok 4.6 across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, multilingual, and math tasks.

- Canonical page: https://benchlm.ai/compare/claude-sonnet-5-5-vs-grok-4-6
- Last updated: September 28, 2026

- Shared sourced benchmarks: 4
- HTML indexing: indexable
- Ranking lane: BenchAlign v5.7

## Quick Verdict

Pick Claude Sonnet 5.5 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Grok 4.6 only makes more sense when its price, context window, or workload-specific category wins matter more than the overall score.

## Summary

- Claude Sonnet 5.5 leads overall 80.49 to 69.02.
- The clearest category separation is in reasoning, where the averages are 79.2 for Claude Sonnet 5.5 and 57.7 for Grok 4.6.
- The biggest single benchmark swing is FrontierSWE v2 in Coding, with scores of 61.9% and 25.3%.
- Grok 4.6 is the cheaper option on output tokens, which matters if you expect large responses or heavy interactive use.
- Claude Sonnet 5.5 also has the larger context window at 1M.

## Model Snapshot

| Property | Claude Sonnet 5.5 | Grok 4.6 |
|----------|----------|----------|
| Creator | Anthropic | xAI |
| Type | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Reasoning | Reasoning | Reasoning |
| Context | 1M | 500K |
| Overall Score | 80.49 | 69.02 |
| Benchmarks Covered | 47 | 18 |
| Pricing (input/output) | $2.00 / $10.00 | $2.00 / $6.00 |

## Category Breakdown

### Agentic

- Winner: Grok 4.6
- Claude Sonnet 5.5 public-lane score: 66.1 (Supported · #10/111)
- Grok 4.6 public-lane score: 68 (Supported · #8/111)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 5.5 | Grok 4.6 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| Terminal-Bench 4.0 | 70.60% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| HLE w/ tools | 64.5% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| DRACO | 87.0% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1 | 59.9% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| LAB all-pass (Harvey held-out) | 10.0% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| LAB criterion-pass (Harvey held-out) | 93.1% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Toolathlon Verified Pass@3 | 85.2% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Toolathlon Verified Pass³ | 68.5% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Toolathlon Verified avg. turns | 31.6 turns | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| AutomationBench (Zapier 1.0.6) | 44.7% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Toolathlon-Verified | 77.8% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Terminal-Bench 3.0 | Coming soon | 26.5% | Coming soon |
| APEX-Agents | Coming soon | 57.5% | Coming soon |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Vals) | Coming soon | 78.3% | Coming soon |
| ApprenticeBench | Coming soon | 13% | Coming soon |

### Coding

- Winner: Directional only
- Claude Sonnet 5.5 public-lane score: 79.6 (Estimated · #3/136)
- Grok 4.6 public-lane score: 61.5 (Supported · #14/136)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 5.5 | Grok 4.6 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| FrontierCode 1.1 Main | 46.2% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| cursorBench40 | 55.5% | 41.4% | Claude Sonnet 5.5 |
| SWE-bench Pro | 81.3% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| SWE Multilingual | 90.3% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| SWE Multimodal | 54.3% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| DeepSWE | 71.0% | 65.9% | Claude Sonnet 5.5 |
| FrontierCode 1.1 Extended | 59.1% | 61.3% | Grok 4.6 |
| ProgramBench | 79.7% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| FrontierSWE v2 | 61.9% | 25.3% | Claude Sonnet 5.5 |
| Bug Hunt Bench | Coming soon | 27 fixes | Coming soon |
| cursorBench32 | Coming soon | 70.8% | Coming soon |
| VulcanBench v3 | Coming soon | 87.0% | Coming soon |
| LiveCodeBench (Vals) | Coming soon | 88.2% | Coming soon |
| SWE-bench (Vals) | Coming soon | 95.6% | Coming soon |

### Reasoning

- Winner: Directional only
- Claude Sonnet 5.5 public-lane score: 79.2 (#7/27)
- Grok 4.6 public-lane score: 57.7 (#23/27)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 5.5 | Grok 4.6 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| ARC-AGI-1 | Coming soon | 87.00% | Coming soon |
| ARC-AGI-2 | Coming soon | 67.1% | Coming soon |
| ARC-AGI-3 | Coming soon | 2.1% | Coming soon |

### Multimodal & Grounded

- Winner: Not comparable
- Claude Sonnet 5.5 public-lane score: 83.3 (Unranked · 7 rankable rows)
- Grok 4.6 public-lane score: Coming soon

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 5.5 | Grok 4.6 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| Chartography (no tools) | 61.6% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Chartography (tools) | 90.2% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| BenchCAD Vision2Code (no tools) | 0.747 | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| BenchCAD Vision2Code (tools) | 0.963 | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Biomedical image analysis | 72.2% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| OfficeQA | 76.9% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| OfficeQA Pro | 65.6% | Coming soon | Coming soon |

### Knowledge

- Winner: Claude Sonnet 5.5
- Claude Sonnet 5.5 public-lane score: 80.9 (Supported · #6/160)
- Grok 4.6 public-lane score: 69 (Supported · #14/160)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 5.5 | Grok 4.6 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| HealthBench (raw) | 69.4% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| HealthBench (length-adjusted) | 65.4% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| HealthBench Professional (raw) | 77.1% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| HealthBench Professional | 69.2% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| BioMysteryBench (human-solvable) | 89.2% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| BioMysteryBench (human-difficult) | 44.7% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| SpatialBench Verified | 72.5% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| SingleCellBench | 59.1% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Protein Design | 51.0% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Morphology-to-molecule matching | 25.0% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Medicinal chemistry | 65.3% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Protein Design library ranking | 54.8% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| De novo protein-binder design | 82.3% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Protocols (troubleshooting) | 67.3% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Protocols (understanding) | 66.6% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| HLE w/o tools | 56.9% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| GPQA Diamond (Vals) | Coming soon | 94.7% | Coming soon |
| MMLU-Pro (Vals) | Coming soon | 89.4% | Coming soon |

### Multilingual

- Winner: Not comparable
- Claude Sonnet 5.5 public-lane score: Coming soon
- Grok 4.6 public-lane score: Coming soon

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 5.5 | Grok 4.6 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| GMMLU | 92.1% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| MILU | 91.6% | Coming soon | Coming soon |

### Mathematics

- Winner: Not comparable
- Claude Sonnet 5.5 public-lane score: Coming soon
- Grok 4.6 public-lane score: Coming soon

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 5.5 | Grok 4.6 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| ArXivMath Aug. 2026 (no tools) | 86.8% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| ArXivMath Aug. 2026 (tools) | 95.2% | Coming soon | Coming soon |

## FAQ

### Which is better overall, Claude Sonnet 5.5 or Grok 4.6?

Claude Sonnet 5.5 is ahead overall on BenchLM right now.

### Where is the biggest gap between Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Grok 4.6?

The widest category gap is in reasoning, where the averages are 79.2 for Claude Sonnet 5.5 and 57.7 for Grok 4.6.

### How many benchmarks does Claude Sonnet 5.5 cover on BenchLM?

Claude Sonnet 5.5 currently has 47 sourced benchmark scores on BenchLM.

### How many benchmarks does Grok 4.6 cover on BenchLM?

Grok 4.6 currently has 18 sourced benchmark scores on BenchLM.

## Related Comparisons

- [Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs GPT-6 Astra](/compare/claude-sonnet-5-5-vs-gpt-6-astra)
- [Grok 4.6 vs GPT-6 Astra](/compare/gpt-6-astra-vs-grok-4-6)
- [Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs Claude Opus 5.5](/compare/claude-opus-5-5-vs-claude-sonnet-5-5)
- [Grok 4.6 vs Claude Opus 5.5](/compare/claude-opus-5-5-vs-grok-4-6)

## Explore More

- [Claude Sonnet 5.5 profile](/models/claude-sonnet-5-5)
- [Grok 4.6 profile](/models/grok-4-6)
- [Compare Pricing](/llm-pricing)
- [Alternative Finder](/tools/alternative-finder)
- [LLM Selector](/tools/llm-selector)
- [Overall Rankings](/best/overall)