Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback) vs Llama 4 Maverick

Which is better for the money: Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback) by Anthropic or Llama 4 Maverick by Meta? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.

Trade-off

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

Intelligence: 56.00
Total cost: $7260

MetaLlama 4 MaverickOff the frontier

Intelligence: 9.30
Total cost: $44.0

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallbac… scores 46.7 points higher (56.0 vs 9.3) but costs 165× as much to run the benchmark ($7260 vs $44.0; flagship vs budget cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallbac… when you need intelligence above 9.3, and Llama 4 Maverick when 9.3 is enough.

Metric	Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback)	Llama 4 Maverick	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	56.0	9.3	−83.4% Llama 4 Maverick is 83.4% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$7,259.50	$43.98	−99.4% Llama 4 Maverick is 99.4% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	385.69s	10.41s	−97.3% Llama 4 Maverick is 97.3% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$2.00 / $10.0	$0.25 / $0.92
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text, Image

Llama 4 Maverick vs Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback): 83.4% less intelligence, 99.4% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 97.3% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback): what beats it Llama 4 Maverick: what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

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.
Llama 4 Maverick is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (Medium) scores 29.90 for $31.2.

Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback)Llama 4 MaverickToday's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model

Matchup

Compare something else

Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-5-5/llama-4-maverick · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-5-5/llama-4-maverick?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill