Comparison
Claude Sonnet vs GPT-5 Mini: the mid-tier workhorses
The two models most production apps actually run. How the price gap compares to the capability gap.
Editorial updated 21 Sept 2026
Source: OpenRouter (live)
Most production traffic does not go to a flagship. It goes to the mid-tier model that is good enough for the task and cheap enough to run at scale. Claude Sonnet and GPT-5 Mini are the two most common answers to that brief.
They are not priced alike. Sonnet sits well above Mini on both input and output tokens, so the question is whether Sonnet's stronger reasoning and longer-horizon reliability justify the premium for your use case. For classification, extraction and short chat turns the answer is usually no; for agentic coding or multi-document analysis it is often yes.
Check the context window and structured-output rows carefully: they matter more than headline price if you routinely send large prompts or parse the model's output programmatically.
Live figures
The numbers
Best value in each row is highlighted. “Not declared” means the provider does not advertise the feature on its listing.
| Attribute | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input priceUSD per 1M tokens | $2.00 | $0.25 (best) |
| Output priceUSD per 1M tokens | $10.00 | $2.00 (best) |
| Blended price75% in / 25% out | $4.00 | $0.69 (best) |
| Vs. market median | 5.0× dearer | 14% cheaper |
| Value rankcheapest = 1 | #344 | #186 (best) |
| Context windowtokens | 1M (best) | 400K |
| Max outputtokens | 128K | 128K |
| Input modalities | text, image, file | text, image, file |
| Output modalities | text | text |
| Tool calling | Declared | Declared |
| Reasoning | Declared | Declared |
| Structured output | Declared | Declared |
| Listed on OpenRouter | 2026-06-30 (best) | 2025-08-07 |
Blended price assumes a 3:1 input-to-output token mix. Median is across all 417 priced models.
Add or swap modelsRead-out
What the numbers say
- OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini is the cheapest here at $0.69/M blended — 5.8× less than Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5.
- Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5 offers the largest context window (1M tokens) versus 400K for OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini.
Our view
Which should you choose?
- Claude Sonnet 5
- Choose Claude Sonnet for agentic coding, long documents and tasks where a wrong answer is expensive.
- GPT-5 Mini
- Choose GPT-5 Mini for high-volume, latency-sensitive or cost-constrained workloads where good-enough is enough.
Models
Model pages
Full pricing history, capabilities and alternatives for each model in this comparison.
Anthropic
$4.00
/M blended
OpenAI
$0.688
/M blended
More comparisons
Other head-to-heads
- Claude vs GPT-5: which frontier model should you pay for?
Anthropic's flagship Claude against OpenAI's GPT-5 line on price, context and declared capabilities, with live figures.
- Gemini vs GPT-5: Google's flagship against OpenAI's
Gemini's very long context and multimodal input against GPT-5's ecosystem and pricing.
- Claude vs Gemini: Anthropic's flagship against Google's
Two very different philosophies: Claude's careful, consistent output versus Gemini's scale and context.
Newsletter
Stay Ahead of AI
Get the most important developments in artificial intelligence delivered directly to your inbox.
No hype. No spam.
Just trusted insights, major model releases, pricing updates, benchmark changes, product reviews, and practical guidance from across the AI ecosystem.
- Weekly AI Briefing
- Major Model Releases
- Pricing & Benchmark Updates
- Unsubscribe Anytime
The AI HQ Briefing
One email a week. Read in five minutes.