ModelRefs / Claude 3 Haiku vs Claude Sonnet 4.5
Claude 3 Haiku vs Claude Sonnet 4.5
Claude 3 Haiku vs Claude Sonnet 4.5: side-by-side benchmarks, pricing, context windows, coding ability and deployment. Pick the right model for your stack.
Overview
Claude 3 Haiku: Claude 3 Haiku is the speed-and-cost tier of Anthropic's original Claude 3 family, built for high-volume work such as customer support, document triage and many small tasks in parallel, with image input across a 200,000-token context window. Anthropic measured it at 21,000 tokens per second for prompts under 32,000 tokens. The claude-3-haiku-20240307 snapshot was deprecated on 19 February 2026 and retired on Anthropic-operated platforms on 20 April 2026, with Claude Haiku 4.5 as the replacement.
Claude Sonnet 4.5: Claude Sonnet 4.5 is Anthropic's balanced frontier model, designed for complex reasoning, coding, and agentic tasks while maintaining production-grade speed. It builds on the Claude 4 family's emphasis on honesty and reduced hallucination rates.
Context window: Claude 3 Haiku accepts up to 200,000 tokens, Claude Sonnet 4.5 up to 200,000. Confirm the limit for your specific deployment channel before relying on it.
Claude 3 Haiku vs Claude Sonnet 4.5 at a glance
| Attribute | Claude 3 Haiku | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| Released | 2024-03-13 | 2025-09-29 |
| Context window | 200,000 tokens | 200,000 tokens |
| Input price | $0.25/M tokens | $3/M tokens |
| Output price | $1.25/M tokens | $15/M tokens |
| Licence | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Self-hostable | No, hosted only | No, hosted only |
| Modalities | text, vision | text, vision |
Where they differ most
- Cost Efficiency: Claude 3 Haiku 83%, Claude Sonnet 4.5 37%. Claude 3 Haiku leads on this dimension.
Capability scores are ModelRefs' own derived signals, not vendor claims or benchmark results. Validate against your own workload before relying on them.
Continue your research
Use these connected ModelRefs sections to compare alternatives, inspect implementation paths, and review the evidence and governance boundaries relevant to Claude 3 Haiku vs Claude Sonnet 4.5.
Frequently asked questions
Which is better, Claude 3 Haiku or Claude Sonnet 4.5?
Claude 3 Haiku and Claude Sonnet 4.5 target different workloads — see the benchmark and pricing tables for a side-by-side answer.
Is Claude 3 Haiku cheaper than Claude Sonnet 4.5?
Compare $0.00025 vs $0.00300 on this page.