HEAD-TO-HEAD · MID-TIER · VERIFIED 15 JUL 2026

Claude Sonnet 5 vs GPT-4o: which is actually cheaper?

Both are mid-tier models from different providers, which makes this one of the more genuinely useful head-to-head comparisons on this site — same rough capability class, real price and context differences worth knowing before you pick.

Spec	Claude Sonnet 5	GPT-4o
Provider	Anthropic	OpenAI
Input / 1M tokens	$2.00	$2.50
Output / 1M tokens	$10.00	$10.00
Context window	1M	128K

The output price gap

GPT-4o is 1.0x cheaper than Claude Sonnet 5 on output tokens specifically — the number that matters most for any workload that generates more than it reads, like drafting or content generation. For input-heavy workloads the gap is different; check the table above directly for your specific ratio.

Context window

Claude Sonnet 5 offers the larger context window of the two at 1M tokens. If your task needs to hold a large document, codebase, or long conversation history in a single call, that ceiling can matter more than the per-token price difference.

Worked example

At 150M input and 40M output tokens a month — a realistic mid-tier workload — Claude Sonnet 5 runs about $700.00/month and GPT-4o runs about $775.00/month on standard list pricing.

Prices verified against each provider's official documentation, 15 July 2026. Use the calculator with your own usage for an exact comparison, or see the full price table for every tracked model.

Frequently asked questions

Is Claude Sonnet 5 or GPT-4o cheaper?

Claude Sonnet 5 is slightly cheaper than GPT-4o — $2.00 versus $2.50 per million input tokens, with identical $10.00 output pricing. At 150M input/40M output monthly, that's $700 for Sonnet 5 versus $775 for GPT-4o.

Which has the bigger context window, Claude Sonnet 5 or GPT-4o?

Claude Sonnet 5 has a much larger context window at 1M tokens compared to GPT-4o's 128K — nearly 8x larger. For long documents or extensive conversation history, this matters more than the modest price gap.

Does the small price difference between Sonnet 5 and GPT-4o matter in practice?

At typical volumes the roughly 10% gap is modest in absolute terms, so context window needs and task-specific performance should usually weigh more heavily than price alone.

Is Claude Sonnet 5's price going up?

Not as things stand. Sonnet 5 launched at $2.00/$10.00 as an introductory rate with a planned move to $3.00/$15.00 on 1 September 2026, but that increase didn't happen. At the current price it stays cheaper than GPT-4o on input and matches it on output.