ModelRefs / Claude 3 Opus vs Claude Sonnet 4.5
Claude 3 Opus vs Claude Sonnet 4.5
Claude 3 Opus 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 Opus: Claude 3 Opus is Anthropic's February 2024 frontier model and the most capable of the original Claude 3 family, accepting text and image input across a 200,000-token context window. The claude-3-opus-20240229 snapshot was deprecated on 30 June 2025 and retired on Anthropic-operated platforms on 5 January 2026, with Claude Opus 4.8 named as its 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 Opus 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 Opus vs Claude Sonnet 4.5 at a glance
| Attribute | Claude 3 Opus | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| Released | 2024-02-29 | 2025-09-29 |
| Context window | 200,000 tokens | 200,000 tokens |
| Input price | $15/M tokens | $3/M tokens |
| Output price | $75/M tokens | $15/M tokens |
| Licence | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Self-hostable | No, hosted only | No, hosted only |
| Modalities | text, vision | text, vision |
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 Opus vs Claude Sonnet 4.5.
Frequently asked questions
Which is better, Claude 3 Opus or Claude Sonnet 4.5?
Claude 3 Opus and Claude Sonnet 4.5 target different workloads — see the benchmark and pricing tables for a side-by-side answer.
Is Claude 3 Opus cheaper than Claude Sonnet 4.5?
Compare $0.0150 vs $0.00300 on this page.