Claude Sonnet 5 vs Opus 4.8: Is Opus Still Worth It?

Claude Sonnet 5 vs Opus 4.8: Is Opus Still Worth Paying For?

Sonnet 5 pricing is 60% less than Opus 4.8 and even beats it on one benchmark. Here's where it actually wins, ties, and falls short.

Jul 1, 2026

by Damilare Odedina

Anthropic rolled out Claude Sonnet 5 yesterday, June 30, and the claims it is their affordable model which now competes with their most expensive one, Opus 4.8.

Sonnet 5 pricing starts at just $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through August 31, compared with $5 and $25 for Claude Opus 4.8. That makes the AI model 60% more affordable during the promotional period, and 40% under its standard pricing after August 31.

But how much of that claim actually holds up?

On the hardest coding benchmark Anthropic publishes, Claude Opus 4.8 still leads by 6 points, so the price gap alone doesn't erase every difference between the two. Yet on a real-world knowledge-work benchmark, Claude Sonnet 5 actually scores higher than Claude Opus 4.8, something no Sonnet model has achieved against an Opus model before. Which one comes out ahead ultimately depends on what you are using it for.

We compared both models across the seven areas that matter most.