Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback) vs Nemotron 3.5 Lightning

Which is better for the money: Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback) by Anthropic or Nemotron 3.5 Lightning by NVIDIA? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-26.

Trade-off

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

Intelligence: 35.90
Total cost: $482

NVIDIANemotron 3.5 LightningOff the frontier

Intelligence: 12.90
Total cost: $92.8

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Low, Default Fallbac… scores 23.0 points higher (35.9 vs 12.9) but costs 5.2× as much to run the benchmark ($482 vs $92.8; both mid-range class). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Low, Default Fallbac… when you need intelligence above 12.9, and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning when 12.9 is enough.

Metric	Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback)	Nemotron 3.5 Lightning	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	35.9	12.9	−64.1% Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is 64.1% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$482.13	$92.76	−80.8% Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is 80.8% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	5.93s	8.97s	+51.3% Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is 51.3% slower
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$2.00 / $10.0	$0.06 / $0.20
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning vs Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback): 64.1% less intelligence, 80.8% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 51.3% slower end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback): what beats it Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Medium) scores 47.80 for $361.
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (Xhigh) scores 34.60 for $66.8.

Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Low, Default Fallback)Nemotron 3.5 LightningToday's Pareto frontierOpen-weights 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-sonnet-5-5-low/nemotron-3-5-lightning · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-5-5-low/nemotron-3-5-lightning?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill