Claude 4.5 Sonnet (Reasoning) vs Claude Haiku 5.5 (Xhigh)
Which is better for the money: Claude 4.5 Sonnet (Reasoning) by Anthropic or Claude Haiku 5.5 (Xhigh) by Anthropic? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-26.
Clear winner
Verdict
Pick Claude Haiku 5.5 (Xhigh)
Claude Haiku 5.5 (Xhigh) vs Claude 4.5 Sonnet (Reasoning): 99.0% more intelligence, 89.5% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 225.4% slower end-to-end.
| Metric | Claude 4.5 Sonnet (Reasoning) | Claude Haiku 5.5 (Xhigh) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence (higher is better) | 20.7 | 41.2 | +99.0% Claude Haiku 5.5 (Xhi… is 99.0% more intelligent |
| Total AA cost (lower is better) | $1,501.22 | $157.58 | −89.5% Claude Haiku 5.5 (Xhi… is 89.5% cheaper |
| End-to-end time (lower is better) | 21.44s | 69.76s | +225.4% Claude Haiku 5.5 (Xhi… is 225.4% slower |
| Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | $3.00 / $15.0 | $0.10 / $0.50 | |
| Input modalities | Text, Image | Text, Image |
Today's Pareto frontier
Against the frontier
- Claude 4.5 Sonnet (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Max) scores 51.80 for $1082.
- Claude Haiku 5.5 (Xhigh) is on today's frontier: nothing is both smarter and cheaper.
Claude 4.5 Sonnet (Reasoning)Claude Haiku 5.5 (Xhigh)Today's Pareto frontierEvery other model
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