ModelRefs / Claude Sonnet 4.5 vs o4 Mini
Claude Sonnet 4.5 vs o4 Mini
Claude Sonnet 4.5 vs o4 Mini: side-by-side benchmarks, pricing, context windows, coding ability and deployment. Pick the right model for your stack.
Overview
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.
o4 Mini: o4 Mini is OpenAI's efficient reasoning model, adding vision support to the mini reasoning tier for agentic tasks needing both image understanding and step-by-step logic at low cost per task. It is now deprecated: OpenAI gives the o4-mini-2025-04-16 snapshot and the o4-mini alias a shutdown date of 23 October 2026, with gpt-5.6-terra as the substitute.
Context window: Claude Sonnet 4.5 accepts up to 200,000 tokens, o4 Mini up to 200,000. Confirm the limit for your specific deployment channel before relying on it.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 vs o4 Mini at a glance
| Attribute | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | o4 Mini |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | OpenAI |
| Released | 2025-09-29 | 2025-04-16 |
| Context window | 200,000 tokens | 200,000 tokens |
| Input price | $3/M tokens | $1.1/M tokens |
| Output price | $15/M tokens | $4.4/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 Sonnet 4.5 37%, o4 Mini 63%. o4 Mini 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 Sonnet 4.5 vs o4 Mini.
Frequently asked questions
Which is better, Claude Sonnet 4.5 or o4 Mini?
Claude Sonnet 4.5 and o4 Mini target different workloads — see the benchmark and pricing tables for a side-by-side answer.
Is Claude Sonnet 4.5 cheaper than o4 Mini?
Compare $0.00300 vs $0.00110 on this page.