Model comparison
Claude Sonnet 5 vs o4-mini
Claude Sonnet 5 is the stronger model overall, scoring 54.6 to 41.6 on the Noometry Index. o4-mini costs 2.1× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Sonnet 5's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Last verified . 34 shared benchmarks.
Summary
- They share 34 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Sonnet 5 scores higher in 9 categories and o4-mini in 1 category; 9 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in math, where Claude Sonnet 5 leads 66.2 to 40.8.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is GSO: 37.3% for Claude Sonnet 5 and 3.6% for o4-mini.
- o4-mini is cheaper at $1.10 / $4.40 per million input/output tokens, against $2 / $10 for Claude Sonnet 5.
- Claude Sonnet 5 accepts more context: 1M tokens versus 200K.
Side by side
| Claude Sonnet 5 | o4-mini | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | OpenAI |
| Noometry Index | 54.6 | 41.6 |
| Released | 2026-06-29 | 2025-04-16 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Context window | 1M | 200K |
| Max output | 128K | 100K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $2 | $1.10 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $10 | $4.40 |
| Results tracked | 51 | 60 |
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Category by category
Coding Claude Sonnet 5 leads
Claude Sonnet 5: 55.5 (#26), o4-mini: 40.9 (#127)
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 5 | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| GSO | 37.3% | 3.6% |
| WeirdML | 68.8% | 52.6% |
| LMArena Coding | 1483 | 1368 |
| ALE-Bench | 1,463 | 826.17 |
| DeepSWE | 53.8% | — |
| FrontierCode | 42.7% | — |
| SWE-bench Verified (bash only) | — | 45% |
| Aider Polyglot | — | 72% |
| CursorBench | 34.1% | — |
| LMArena WebDev | 1541 | — |
| SciCode | 54.3% | — |
| CadEval | — | 62% |
| AlgoTune | — | 1.72 |
Agentic & Tool Use Claude Sonnet 5 leads
Claude Sonnet 5: 42.8 (#18), o4-mini: 32.6 (#61)
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 5 | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| APEX-Agents | 54.5% | — |
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 53.2% |
| GDPval | — | 25.3% |
| GBAEval | 65.3% | — |
| LMArena Search | 1194 | — |
| METR Time Horizons | — | 63.9% |
| Vending-Bench 2 | 6,378 | — |
Reasoning Claude Sonnet 5 leads
Claude Sonnet 5: 49.1 (#39), o4-mini: 24.6 (#162)
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 5 | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| SimpleBench | 60.6% | 38.7% |
| CritPt | 16.9% | 0.6% |
| Chess Puzzles | 35% | 26% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1461 | 1351 |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | 35% | 5% |
| DTBench | 92.5% | 77.6% |
| LMCA | 50% | 26.5% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 156.21 | 145.64 |
| ForecastBench | 61.1 | 61.8 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | — | 6.1% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 67.6% |
| NYT Connections (extended) | 75.1% | — |
| ARC-AGI-1 | — | 58.7% |
| EnigmaEval | — | 9.2% |
| Surface Evolver Bench | 60% | — |
| Bench to the Future 3 | 0.14 | — |
Math Claude Sonnet 5 leads
Claude Sonnet 5: 66.2 (#27), o4-mini: 40.8 (#89)
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 5 | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | 65.6% | 36.1% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | 29.3% | 4.9% |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 94.7% | 81.7% |
| LMArena Math | 1467 | 1389 |
| ProofBench | 77% | — |
| Omni-MATH | — | 72% |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 97.8% |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | — | 24.8% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | — | 6.3% |
Knowledge Claude Sonnet 5 leads
Claude Sonnet 5: 55.6 (#47), o4-mini: 43.6 (#91)
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 5 | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 90.5% | 79.6% |
| SimpleQA Verified | 33.7% | 19.6% |
| LMArena Expert | 1490 | 1343 |
| Humanity's Last Exam | — | 18.1% |
| MMLU-Pro | — | 82% |
| Confabulations | — | 15.8% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 18.6% |
| GPQA (HELM) | — | 73.5% |
Multimodal Claude Sonnet 5 leads
Claude Sonnet 5: 42.4 (#31), o4-mini: 40.2 (#49)
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 5 | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1274 | 1194 |
| GeoBench | — | 64% |
| VPCT | — | 57.5% |
| Blueprint-Bench 2 | 24.9% | — |
| LMArena Document | 1466 | — |
Multilingual Claude Sonnet 5 leads
Claude Sonnet 5: 53.8 (#55), o4-mini: 47.0 (#154)
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 5 | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1431 | 1337 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1477 | 1354 |
| LMArena French | 1460 | 1364 |
| LMArena German | 1440 | 1336 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1422 | 1308 |
| LMArena Korean | 1411 | 1312 |
| LMArena Russian | 1451 | 1334 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1437 | 1347 |
Instruction Following Claude Sonnet 5 leads
Claude Sonnet 5: 76.3 (#41), o4-mini: 75.2 (#68)
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 5 | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1452 | 1321 |
| IFEval | — | 92.8% |
Long Context Too close to call
Claude Sonnet 5: 44.8 (#55), o4-mini: 45.5 (#33)
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 5 | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1463 | 1315 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | — | 77.8% |
Writing & Preference Claude Sonnet 5 leads
Claude Sonnet 5: 69.2 (#25), o4-mini: 54.0 (#152)
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 5 | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1442 | 1353 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1416 | 1294 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1454 | 1350 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | — | 75% |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1794 | — |
| WildBench | — | 85.4% |
| EQ-Bench 4 | 1236 | — |
Frequently asked questions
Is Claude Sonnet 5 better than o4-mini?
Claude Sonnet 5 is the stronger model overall, scoring 54.6 to 41.6 on the Noometry Index. o4-mini costs 2.1× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Sonnet 5's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Which is cheaper, Claude Sonnet 5 or o4-mini?
o4-mini is cheaper. It lists at $1.10 per million input tokens and $4.40 per million output tokens; Claude Sonnet 5 lists at $2 and $10.
Is Claude Sonnet 5 or o4-mini better for coding?
Claude Sonnet 5 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 55.5 versus 40.9 in the Noometry coding category.
Which has the bigger context window?
Claude Sonnet 5 does, with 1M tokens against 200K.
How many benchmarks do Claude Sonnet 5 and o4-mini share?
34 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Sonnet 5 has 51 scored results on Noometry and o4-mini has 60.