Claude Haiku 5.5 (Low) vs Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback)
Which is better for the money: Claude Haiku 5.5 (Low) by Anthropic or Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) by Anthropic? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-27.
Depends on your budget
Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) scores 24.1 points higher (53.6 vs 29.5) but costs 63× as much to run the benchmark ($2172 vs $34.3; flagship vs budget cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) when you need intelligence above 29.5, and Claude Haiku 5.5 (Low) when 29.5 is enough.
| Metric | Claude Haiku 5.5 (Low) | Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence (higher is better) | 29.5 | 53.6 | +81.7% Claude Opus 5.5 (High… is 81.7% more intelligent |
| Total AA cost (lower is better) | $34.31 | $2,172.43 | +6231.8% Claude Opus 5.5 (High… is 63× more expensive |
| End-to-end time (lower is better) | 11.44s | 40.99s | +258.3% Claude Opus 5.5 (High… is 258.3% slower |
| Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | $0.10 / $0.50 | $4.00 / $20.0 | |
| Input modalities | Text, Image | Text, Image |
Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) vs Claude Haiku 5.5 (Low): 81.7% more intelligence, 6231.8% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 258.3% slower end-to-end.
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 Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) is on today's frontier: nothing is both smarter and cheaper.
Compare something else
Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/claude-haiku-5-5-low/claude-opus-5-5-high · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-haiku-5-5-low/claude-opus-5-5-high?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill