# Claude Opus 4.6 vs Sonar

> Claude Opus 4.6 is the stronger model overall, scoring 58.2 to 38.5 on the Noometry Index. Sonar costs 10× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 4.6's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/claude-opus-4-6-vs-sonar
- Last updated: 2026-10-11
- Shared benchmarks: 0

## Summary

- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Claude Opus 4.6 leads 57.8 to 21.1.
- Sonar is cheaper at $1 / $1 per million input/output tokens, against $5 / $25 for Claude Opus 4.6.
- Claude Opus 4.6 accepts more context: 1M tokens versus 128K.

## Snapshot

| | Claude Opus 4.6 | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Perplexity |
| Noometry Index | 58.2 | 38.5 |
| Rank | 20 | 187 |
| Context | 1M | 128K |
| Input $/M | $5 | $1 |
| Output $/M | $25 | $1 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Claude Opus 4.6: 57.2 (#20)
- Sonar: 35.7 (#221)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 78.7% | — |
| FrontierCode | 26.6% | — |
| SWE-bench Verified (bash only) | 75.6% | — |
| LMArena WebDev | 1547 | — |
| SWE-bench Multilingual | 72% | — |
| GSO | 41.2% | — |
| WeirdML | 78% | — |
| LiveBench Coding | — | 35.1% |
| LMArena Coding | 1536 | — |
| ALE-Bench | 996.5 | — |
| AlgoTune | 1.47 | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Claude Opus 4.6: 51.1 (#4)
- Sonar: —

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal-Bench | 79.8% | — |
| APEX-Agents | 46.3% | — |
| Remote Labor Index | 4.2% | — |
| τ²-bench Banking | 27.3% | — |
| Cybench | 93% | — |
| DeepResearch Bench | 55.3% | — |
| GBAEval | 44.1% | — |
| LMArena Search | 1253 | — |
| METR Time Horizons | 78.9% | — |
| Vending-Bench 2 | 8,018 | — |

## Reasoning

- Claude Opus 4.6: 57.8 (#23)
- Sonar: 21.1 (#227)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| ARC-AGI-2 | 69.2% | — |
| SimpleBench | 67.6% | — |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 83.6% | — |
| NYT Connections (extended) | 92.1% | — |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 94% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | 17% | — |
| EnigmaEval | 7.6% | — |
| Thematic Generalization | 80.6% | — |
| EBR-Bench | 12.7% | — |
| LiveBench Reasoning | — | 46.3% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1527 | — |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | 25% | — |
| DTBench | 91.2% | — |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | — | 37.9% |
| LMCA | 55.8% | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 155.24 | — |
| ForecastBench | 60 | — |
| LiveBench | — | 46.9% |

## Math

- Claude Opus 4.6: 63.0 (#31)
- Sonar: 33.7 (#200)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | 66% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | 26.8% | — |
| MathArena Final-Answer Competitions | 78.5% | — |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 94.4% | — |
| ProofBench | 50% | — |
| LiveBench Math | — | 41.6% |
| LMArena Math | 1519 | — |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 40.7% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | 22.9% | — |

## Knowledge

- Claude Opus 4.6: 61.9 (#26)
- Sonar: —

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 90.5% | — |
| Humanity's Last Exam | 34.4% | — |
| SimpleQA Verified | 47% | — |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 12.2% | — |
| LMArena Expert | 1546 | — |

## Multimodal

- Claude Opus 4.6: 37.3 (#74)
- Sonar: —

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1316 | — |
| Furniture Assembly | 28.3% | — |
| LMArena Document | 1507 | — |

## Multilingual

- Claude Opus 4.6: 57.9 (#6)
- Sonar: —

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1489 | — |
| LMArena Chinese | 1551 | — |
| LMArena French | 1513 | — |
| LMArena German | 1502 | — |
| LMArena Japanese | 1484 | — |
| LMArena Korean | 1464 | — |
| LMArena Russian | 1497 | — |
| LMArena Spanish | 1510 | — |

## Instruction Following

- Claude Opus 4.6: 79.5 (#4)
- Sonar: 71.4 (#150)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench Instruction Following | — | 76.2% |
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1523 | — |

## Long Context

- Claude Opus 4.6: 48.1 (#13)
- Sonar: —

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| CL-bench | 20.7% | — |
| CL-bench Life | 17% | — |
| LMArena Longer Query | 1520 | — |

## Writing & Preference

- Claude Opus 4.6: 73.5 (#10)
- Sonar: 52.6 (#167)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Sonar |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1503 | — |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1505 | — |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1809 | — |
| EQ-Bench 4 | 1223 | — |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1513 | — |
| LiveBench Language | — | 44.1% |

## FAQ

### Is Claude Opus 4.6 better than Sonar?

Claude Opus 4.6 is the stronger model overall, scoring 58.2 to 38.5 on the Noometry Index. Sonar costs 10× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 4.6's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.6 or Sonar?

Sonar is cheaper. It lists at $1 per million input tokens and $1 per million output tokens; Claude Opus 4.6 lists at $5 and $25.

### Is Claude Opus 4.6 or Sonar better for coding?

Claude Opus 4.6 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 57.2 versus 35.7 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Claude Opus 4.6 does, with 1M tokens against 128K.

### How many benchmarks do Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonar share?

0 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Opus 4.6 has 68 scored results on Noometry and Sonar has 7.