Claude Opus 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback) vs Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback)

Which is better for the money: Claude Opus 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback) by Anthropic or Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback) by Anthropic? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-26.

Trade-off

AnthropicClaude Opus 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 42.30
Total cost: $860

AnthropicClaude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 56.00
Total cost: $7260

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallbac… scores 13.7 points higher (56.0 vs 42.3) but costs 8.4× as much to run the benchmark ($7260 vs $860; flagship vs premium cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallbac… when you need intelligence above 42.3, and Claude Opus 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback) when 42.3 is enough.

Metric	Claude Opus 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback)	Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	42.3	56.0	+32.4% Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Ma… is 32.4% more intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$860.33	$7,259.50	+743.8% Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Ma… is 8.4× more expensive
End-to-end time (lower is better)	13.96s	419.55s	+2905.4% Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Ma… is 2905.4% slower
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$4.00 / $20.0	$2.00 / $10.0
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text, Image

Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback) vs Claude Opus 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback): 32.4% more intelligence, 743.8% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 2905.4% slower end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Claude Opus 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback): what beats it Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Opus 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Xhigh) scores 51.00 for $662.
Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Opus 5.5 (Xhigh, Default Fallback) scores 56.00 for $4057.

Claude Opus 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback)Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback)Today's Pareto frontierEvery other model

Matchup

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Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/claude-opus-5-5-low/claude-sonnet-5-5 · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-opus-5-5-low/claude-sonnet-5-5?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill