# Claude Sonnet 4 vs Nemotron 3.5 Lightning

> Claude Sonnet 4 and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning score almost the same on the Noometry Index (40.8 vs 40.0), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/claude-sonnet-4-vs-nemotron-3-5-lightning
- Last updated: 2026-10-12
- Shared benchmarks: 18

## Summary

- They share 18 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Sonnet 4 scores higher in 6 categories and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning in 2 categories; 8 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in writing & preference, where Claude Sonnet 4 leads 57.1 to 48.5.
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is cheaper at $0.05 / $0.20 per million input/output tokens, against $3 / $15 for Claude Sonnet 4.
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning accepts more context: 262K tokens versus 200K.
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Claude Sonnet 4 | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | NVIDIA |
| Noometry Index | 40.8 | 40.0 |
| Rank | 145 | 155 |
| Context | 200K | 262K |
| Input $/M | $3 | $0.05 |
| Output $/M | $15 | $0.20 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Claude Sonnet 4: 43.5 (#88)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 40.4 (#141)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1414 | 1375 |
| SWE-bench Verified (bash only) | 64.9% | — |
| Aider Polyglot | 61.3% | — |
| SciCode | 40% | — |
| GSO | 4.9% | — |
| WeirdML | 46.1% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 655.35 | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Claude Sonnet 4: 38.5 (#31)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: —

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| TheAgentCompany | 33.1% | — |
| Cybench | 35% | — |
| DeepResearch Bench | 46.6% | — |
| OSWorld | 43.9% | — |
| METR Time Horizons | 62% | — |

## Reasoning

- Claude Sonnet 4: 22.9 (#187)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 26.8 (#127)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1372 | 1337 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 5.9% | — |
| SimpleBench | 45.5% | — |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 73% | — |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 40% | — |
| CritPt | 0.3% | — |
| EnigmaEval | 3.1% | — |
| DTBench | 77.1% | — |
| LMCA | 29% | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 141.69 | — |
| ForecastBench | 60.2 | — |

## Math

- Claude Sonnet 4: 43.3 (#80)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 37.5 (#155)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Math | 1375 | 1359 |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 71.1% | — |
| Omni-MATH | 60.2% | — |
| MATH Level 5 | 84.4% | — |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 4.1% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | 0% | — |

## Knowledge

- Claude Sonnet 4: 41.8 (#108)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 37.5 (#154)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | 1372 | 1356 |
| GPQA Diamond | 79.2% | — |
| Humanity's Last Exam | 7.8% | — |
| MMLU-Pro | 84.3% | — |
| Confabulations | 13.2% | — |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 10.3% | — |
| GPQA (HELM) | 70.6% | — |

## Multimodal

- Claude Sonnet 4: 26.2 (#121)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: —

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1191 | — |
| GeoBench | 37% | — |
| VPCT | 34% | — |
| MindCube | 44.8% | — |

## Multilingual

- Claude Sonnet 4: 46.7 (#156)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 44.0 (#180)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1333 | 1295 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1350 | 1359 |
| LMArena French | 1363 | 1366 |
| LMArena German | 1331 | 1282 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1302 | 1206 |
| LMArena Korean | 1291 | 1238 |
| LMArena Russian | 1355 | 1253 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1357 | 1345 |

## Instruction Following

- Claude Sonnet 4: 71.7 (#145)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 69.6 (#170)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1376 | 1318 |
| IFEval | 84% | — |

## Long Context

- Claude Sonnet 4: 33.7 (#259)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 39.9 (#165)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1398 | 1314 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | 46.9% | — |

## Writing & Preference

- Claude Sonnet 4: 57.1 (#132)
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 48.5 (#201)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1351 | 1327 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1345 | 1254 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1483 | 1280 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1376 | 1328 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | 81.4% | — |
| WildBench | 83.8% | — |

## FAQ

### Is Claude Sonnet 4 better than Nemotron 3.5 Lightning?

Claude Sonnet 4 and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning score almost the same on the Noometry Index (40.8 vs 40.0), so choose on price, context window or the category you care about most.

### Which is cheaper, Claude Sonnet 4 or Nemotron 3.5 Lightning?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is cheaper. It lists at $0.05 per million input tokens and $0.20 per million output tokens; Claude Sonnet 4 lists at $3 and $15.

### Is Claude Sonnet 4 or Nemotron 3.5 Lightning better for coding?

Claude Sonnet 4 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 43.5 versus 40.4 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning does, with 262K tokens against 200K.

### How many benchmarks do Claude Sonnet 4 and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning share?

18 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Sonnet 4 has 58 scored results on Noometry and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning has 18.