Claude Sonnet 5 vs Grok 4
Verdict
- Claude Sonnet 5 (high) and Grok 4 are level on quality (60.0 vs 59.8).
- Claude Sonnet 5 (high) is stronger in agents & tools, coding, composite, human preference, knowledge, multimodal, reasoning.
- Grok 4 is stronger in long context, instruction following, maths.
- Grok 4 is 2.6× cheaper ($1.56 vs $4.00 per 1M blended).
| Metric | Claude Sonnet 5 (high) | Grok 4 |
|---|---|---|
| BenchLeader Index | 60.0 | 59.8 |
| Agents & tools score | 60.8 | 53.4 |
| Coding score | 61.5 | 61.2 |
| Composite score | 63.4 | – |
| Human preference score | 65.9 | 59.8 |
| Knowledge score | 58.9 | 56.0 |
| Long context score | 62.1 | 77.7 |
| Multimodal score | 63.1 | 54.5 |
| Reasoning score | 66.5 | 58.3 |
| Instruction following score | – | 67.7 |
| Maths score | – | 58.0 |
| Blended price $/M | $4.00 | $1.56 |
| Output speed | 68 tok/s | – |
| Time to first answer | 1.8 s | – |
| Context window | 1M | 256k |
| GPQA Diamond | – | 87.0% |
| OTIS Mock AIME | – | 84.0% |
| Terminal-Bench | – | 27.2% |
| SimpleBench | – | 60.5% |
| Fiction.LiveBench 120k | – | 96.9% |
| SciCode | 48.6% | – |
| Cybench | – | 43.0% |
| WeirdML | 68.8% | 45.7% |
| APEX-Agents | – | 15.2% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | – | 146.4 |
| LMArena Text | 1461 | 1411 |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1488 | 1420 |
| LMArena Coding | 1521 | 1435 |
| LMArena WebDev | 1537 | – |
| LMArena Vision | 1278 | 1210 |
| LMArena Agent | 5.9 | – |
| AA Intelligence Index | 32.0 | – |
| AA-LCR | 76.7% | – |
| AA-Omniscience | -3.7 | – |
| Humanity's Last Exam (AA) | 35.7% | – |
| SciCode (AA) | 54.3% | – |
| AIME (Vals) | – | 90.6% |
| LiveCodeBench | – | 83.3% |
| MMLU-Pro | – | 85.3% |
| LegalBench | – | 83.2% |
| CorpFin | – | 66.0% |
| TaxEval | – | 65.1% |
| MedQA | – | 92.5% |
| MGSM | – | 90.9% |
| SWE-bench (Vals) | – | 57.8% |
| GPQA Diamond (Vals) | – | 88.1% |
| IMO 2025 | – | 21.4% |
| MathArena Apex | – | 2.1% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | – | 73.6% |
| IFEval (HELM) | – | 94.9% |
| Omni-MATH (HELM) | – | 60.3% |
| WildBench (HELM) | – | 79.7% |
| MMLU-Pro (HELM) | – | 85.1% |
| GPQA Diamond (HELM) | – | 72.6% |
| HELM Capabilities mean | – | 78.5% |
| Aider Polyglot | – | 79.6% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | – | 79.6% |
| ARC-AGI-2 | – | 29.4% |
| BFCL Overall | – | 63.0% |
Data as of 2026-09-13. Best configuration of each model; every score links to its source on the model pages.
Claude Sonnet 5 vs Grok 4: questions
- Is Claude Sonnet 5 better than Grok 4?
- Claude Sonnet 5 (high) and Grok 4 are level on quality (60.0 vs 59.8). The BenchLeader Index combines every independent quality benchmark; Claude Sonnet 5 (high) is ahead overall as of 2026-09-13, but check the category scores for your use.
- Is Claude Sonnet 5 better than Grok 4 for coding?
- Claude Sonnet 5 scores higher in coding (62 vs 61 on the category index, where 50 is average).
- Is Claude Sonnet 5 better than Grok 4 for agentic tasks?
- Claude Sonnet 5 scores higher in agentic tasks (61 vs 53 on the category index, where 50 is average).
- Which is cheaper, Claude Sonnet 5 or Grok 4?
- Grok 4 is cheaper: $1.56 against $4.00 per million tokens, blended at three input tokens per output token.
- Which has the larger context window?
- Claude Sonnet 5 accepts more context: 1M against 256k tokens.