Claude Opus 5 vs Claude Haiku 4.5
Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 and Anthropic's Claude Haiku 4.5 both target production language workloads, but they price and behave differently. Here is the side-by-side.
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The short answer
Claude Haiku 4.5 is the cheaper option — roughly 5.0x less on a blended workload, and it suits lowest-latency claude responses. Claude Opus 5 justifies its premium when you need most teams' best claude starting point.
Anthropic • Claude 5
$5.00 / $25.00
/ 1M tokens (input / output)
A step change over Opus 4.8 on deep reasoning and long-horizon agentic work, at half Fable 5's price and with the freshest knowledge cutoff in the Claude line. Anthropic's own guidance is that most teams should benchmark Opus 5 before paying for Fable 5.
Anthropic • Claude 4.5
$1.00 / $5.00
/ 1M tokens (input / output)
The fastest model Anthropic ships, still on the Claude 4.5 generation with a 200K window and an early-2025 knowledge cutoff. Worth it when response latency is the product requirement; otherwise Sonnet 5 offers more capability and five times the context for twice the price.
Input price
Claude Haiku 4.5 is 80% cheaper than Claude Opus 5 on input tokens.
Output price
Claude Haiku 4.5 is 80% cheaper than Claude Opus 5 on output tokens — usually the side that dominates the bill.
Monthly cost at three workload sizes
Standard (non-batch, non-cached) rates. Reasoning models will exceed these figures because thinking tokens bill as output.
| Workload | Claude Opus 5 | Claude Haiku 4.5 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light — 1M in / 200K out | $10 | $2 | $8 |
| Moderate — 10M in / 2M out | $100 | $20 | $80 |
| Heavy — 100M in / 20M out | $1,000 | $200 | $800 |
Specification comparison
| Attribute | Claude Opus 5 | Claude Haiku 4.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Input (/ 1M tokens) | $5.00 | $1.00 |
| Output (/ 1M tokens) | $25.00 | $5.00 |
| Cached input | $0.50 | $0.10 |
| Context window | 1,000,000 tokens | 200,000 tokens |
| Max output | 128,000 tokens | 64,000 tokens |
| Native reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Knowledge cutoff | 2026-05 | 2025-02 |
| Relative latency | medium | low |
| Open weights | No | No |
| API model ID | claude-opus-5 | claude-haiku-4-5 |
| Status | stable | stable |
Choose Claude Opus 5 if…
- Agentic engineering with a cost ceiling
- Deep research and analysis
- Test-time compute scaling
- Production assistants needing recent knowledge
Choose Claude Haiku 4.5 if…
- Real-time chat suggestions
- Lightweight extraction and tagging
- Guardrail and routing calls
- High-frequency background jobs
Frequently asked
Is Claude Opus 5 or Claude Haiku 4.5 cheaper?
Claude Haiku 4.5 is cheaper. On a blended 3:1 input-to-output workload it costs about 5.0x less than Claude Opus 5.
Which has the larger context window, Claude Opus 5 or Claude Haiku 4.5?
Claude Opus 5 has the larger window at 1M tokens versus 200K.
Should I use Claude Opus 5 or Claude Haiku 4.5?
Pick Claude Opus 5 for most teams' best claude starting point. Pick Claude Haiku 4.5 for lowest-latency claude responses. If cost dominates the decision, Claude Haiku 4.5 wins; if you need the capability ceiling, benchmark both on your own evals before committing.