model
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Cost-effective balanced model with near-Opus quality at Sonnet pricing
7.7Overall
Utility8
Onboarding7
Craft8
Niche fit7
Longevity8
Five dimensions scored independently; overall is a weighted average. Scores are only comparable within this same rubric.
Good for
Teams needing high-quality inference with budget constraints
Not for
Users demanding absolute top performance regardless of cost
Project description
Anthropic's balanced model (Feb 2026). 1M context (GA), 64K output. Near-Opus quality at Sonnet pricing. Preferred over previous Sonnet 70% of time in Claude Code testing.
Alternatives
Claude OpusGPT-4-turbo