Claude Haiku 5.5 (Low) vs Claude Haiku 5.5 (Medium)
Which is better for the money: Claude Haiku 5.5 (Low) by Anthropic or Claude Haiku 5.5 (Medium) by Anthropic? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-24.
Trade-off
Verdict
Depends on your budget
Claude Haiku 5.5 (Medium) scores 5.0 points higher (34.5 vs 29.5) but costs 1.6× as much to run the benchmark ($56.4 vs $34.3; mid-range vs budget cost classes). Pick Claude Haiku 5.5 (Medium) when the extra intelligence is worth the premium, otherwise Claude Haiku 5.5 (Low).
| Metric | Claude Haiku 5.5 (Low) | Claude Haiku 5.5 (Medium) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence (higher is better) | 29.5 | 34.5 | +16.9% Claude Haiku 5.5 (Med… is 16.9% more intelligent |
| Total AA cost (lower is better) | $34.31 | $56.36 | +64.3% Claude Haiku 5.5 (Med… is 64.3% more expensive |
| End-to-end time (lower is better) | 10.19s | 10.41s | +2.2% Claude Haiku 5.5 (Med… is 2.2% slower |
| Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | $0.10 / $0.50 | $0.10 / $0.50 | |
| Input modalities | Text, Image | Text, Image |
Claude Haiku 5.5 (Medium) vs Claude Haiku 5.5 (Low): 16.9% more intelligence, 64.3% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 2.2% slower end-to-end.
Today's Pareto frontier
Against the frontier
- Claude Haiku 5.5 (Low) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (Medium) scores 29.90 for $31.2.
- Claude Haiku 5.5 (Medium) is on today's frontier: nothing is both smarter and cheaper.
Claude Haiku 5.5 (Low)Claude Haiku 5.5 (Medium)Today's Pareto frontierEvery other model
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