# Claude Sonnet 4 vs Nova 2 Lite

> Claude Sonnet 4 is the stronger model overall, scoring 40.6 to 39.0 on the Noometry Index. Nova 2 Lite costs 7.1× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Sonnet 4's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/claude-sonnet-4-vs-nova-2-lite
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 18

## Summary

- They share 18 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Sonnet 4 scores higher in 5 categories and Nova 2 Lite in 4 categories; 7 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in agentic & tool use, where Claude Sonnet 4 leads 38.3 to 23.9.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is Vectara Hallucination Rate: 10.3% for Claude Sonnet 4 and 5.1% for Nova 2 Lite.
- Nova 2 Lite is cheaper at $0.30 / $2.50 per million input/output tokens, against $3 / $15 for Claude Sonnet 4.
- Nova 2 Lite accepts more context: 1M tokens versus 200K.

## Snapshot

| | Claude Sonnet 4 | Nova 2 Lite |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Amazon |
| Noometry Index | 40.6 | 39.0 |
| Rank | 139 | 161 |
| Context | 200K | 1M |
| Input $/M | $3 | $0.30 |
| Output $/M | $15 | $2.50 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Claude Sonnet 4: 44.0 (#70)
- Nova 2 Lite: 40.1 (#131)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Nova 2 Lite |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1414 | 1386 |
| 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: 38.3 (#29)
- Nova 2 Lite: 23.9 (#114)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Nova 2 Lite |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 27.1% |
| TheAgentCompany | 33.1% | — |
| Cybench | 35% | — |
| DeepResearch Bench | 46.6% | — |
| OSWorld | 43.9% | — |
| METR Time Horizons | 62% | — |

## Reasoning

- Claude Sonnet 4: 23.0 (#169)
- Nova 2 Lite: 26.4 (#120)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Nova 2 Lite |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1372 | 1364 |
| 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: 41.5 (#71)
- Nova 2 Lite: 34.8 (#154)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Nova 2 Lite |
|---|---|---|
| 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: 41.6 (#99)
- Nova 2 Lite: 42.5 (#88)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Nova 2 Lite |
|---|---|---|
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 10.3% | 5.1% |
| LMArena Expert | 1371 | 1360 |
| GPQA Diamond | 79.2% | — |
| Humanity's Last Exam | 7.8% | — |
| MMLU-Pro | 84.3% | — |
| Confabulations | 13.2% | — |
| GPQA (HELM) | 70.6% | — |

## Multimodal

- Claude Sonnet 4: 25.6 (#116)
- Nova 2 Lite: —

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Nova 2 Lite |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1191 | — |
| GeoBench | 37% | — |
| VPCT | 34% | — |
| MindCube | 44.8% | — |

## Multilingual

- Claude Sonnet 4: 46.9 (#151)
- Nova 2 Lite: 47.3 (#148)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Nova 2 Lite |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1333 | 1337 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1351 | 1364 |
| LMArena French | 1364 | 1381 |
| LMArena German | 1331 | 1343 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1301 | 1273 |
| LMArena Korean | 1293 | 1284 |
| LMArena Russian | 1355 | 1343 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1356 | 1372 |

## Instruction Following

- Claude Sonnet 4: 71.8 (#141)
- Nova 2 Lite: 70.7 (#156)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Nova 2 Lite |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1375 | 1335 |
| IFEval | 84% | — |

## Long Context

- Claude Sonnet 4: 33.6 (#254)
- Nova 2 Lite: 40.6 (#145)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Nova 2 Lite |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1398 | 1335 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | 46.9% | — |

## Writing & Preference

- Claude Sonnet 4: 57.3 (#127)
- Nova 2 Lite: 54.1 (#150)

| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4 | Nova 2 Lite |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1351 | 1362 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1345 | 1291 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1376 | 1338 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | 81.4% | — |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1483 | — |
| WildBench | 83.8% | — |

## FAQ

### Is Claude Sonnet 4 better than Nova 2 Lite?

Claude Sonnet 4 is the stronger model overall, scoring 40.6 to 39.0 on the Noometry Index. Nova 2 Lite costs 7.1× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Sonnet 4's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, Claude Sonnet 4 or Nova 2 Lite?

Nova 2 Lite is cheaper. It lists at $0.30 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens; Claude Sonnet 4 lists at $3 and $15.

### Is Claude Sonnet 4 or Nova 2 Lite better for coding?

Claude Sonnet 4 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 44.0 versus 40.1 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Nova 2 Lite does, with 1M tokens against 200K.

### How many benchmarks do Claude Sonnet 4 and Nova 2 Lite share?

18 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Sonnet 4 has 58 scored results on Noometry and Nova 2 Lite has 19.