Claude Sonnet 5 vs Grok 4.5

Side-by-side pricing, features and compliance for any tools in the directory.

Side-by-side comparison of Claude Sonnet 5, Grok 4.5: pricing, capabilities, integrations and compliance — from verified HokAI records.

Claude Sonnet 5

Anthropic

Pick it if: Sonnet 5 fits engineering teams running high-volume agentic coding and computer-use work who want near-Opus quality at Sonnet pricing. It's the wrong pick for voice or video-first products, since it has no native audio or video I/O, and for configs still pinned to non-default sampling parameters. Max output runs to 128,000 tokens on the synchronous API.

Its edge: First model to break 80% on SWE-bench Verified at 82.1%, ahead of Gemini 3.1 Pro (80.6%) and GPT-5.4 (~80%).

The catch: No native audio or video input/output; text and image only, requiring a separate ASR/TTS stack for voice apps.

Grok 4.5

xAI

Pick it if: Grok 4.5 replaces Grok 4.3 as xAI's coding-focused model, fitting teams running high-volume agentic coding who want low cost per resolved task. It averages 15,954 output tokens per SWE-bench Pro task, well under Claude Opus 4.8's 67,020, at faster output speed than xAI's own prior release.

Its edge: Beats GPT-5.5 head-to-head on SWE-bench Pro (64.7% vs 58.6%), the one coding benchmark xAI chose to publish at launch.

The catch: No GPQA Diamond, AIME 2025, MMLU-Pro, or ARC-AGI 2 scores published at launch, so pure academic-reasoning performance is unverified.

Pricing

Input / 1M tokens$3$2
Output / 1M tokens$15$6
Cached input / 1M$0.3$0.5
Blended cost (3:1)$6$3
Summarise a 20-page PDF$0.105$0.066
Support reply$0.010$0.0058
One coding agent run$0.900$0.520
Free tiertruefalse

Verdict & fit

StrengthsFirst model to break 80% on SWE-bench Verified at 82.1%, ahead of Gemini 3.1 Pro (80.6%) and GPT-5.4 (~80%).; Computer use jumped to 81.2% on OSWorld-Verified and 80.4% on Terminal-Bench 2.1, up from 78.5% and 67.0% on Sonnet 4.6.; Priced aBeats GPT-5.5 head-to-head on SWE-bench Pro (64.7% vs 58.6%), the one coding benchmark xAI chose to publish at launch.; Resolves the average coding-agent task in far fewer output tokens than Claude Opus 4.8, which compounds into lower real-
LimitationsNo native audio or video input/output; text and image only, requiring a separate ASR/TTS stack for voice apps.; New tokenizer produces roughly 30% more tokens for the same text than Sonnet 4.6, inflating raw token counts and requiring max_tNo GPQA Diamond, AIME 2025, MMLU-Pro, or ARC-AGI 2 scores published at launch, so pure academic-reasoning performance is unverified.; Context window is the smallest of xAI's current model line-up, a real regression for teams with workflows

Capability envelope

Context window1M500K
Max output tokens128K--
Input modalitiestext; image; pdftext; image; tool-calls
Output modalitiestext; tool-callstext; tool-calls
CapabilitiesVision; Tool use; Web browsingVision; Tool use; Web browsing
Reasoning modesadaptive-thinkinglow; medium; high
Long-context recallhighunverified
Opennessproprietaryproprietary

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