Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6

Compare Claude Haiku 4.5 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 on the metrics that decide an agent workload.

MetricClaude Haiku 4.5Claude Sonnet 4.6
ProviderAnthropicAnthropic
Input / 1M$1.00$3.00
Output / 1M$5.00$15.00
Cache read / 1M$0.10 (−90%)$0.30 (−90%)
Reuse-adj @55%$1.63$4.89
Context200K1M
Cache capture90%91%
Warm TTFT110ms (−66%)190ms (−65%)
Quality index8090

Teal marks the better value in each row. Reuse-adjusted assumes 55% prefix reuse and a 25% output share.

Pick Claude Haiku 4.5 when

Pick Claude Haiku 4.5 when it is cheaper once prefix reuse is priced in, it answers faster on warm cache hits.

Pick Claude Sonnet 4.6 when

Pick Claude Sonnet 4.6 when it scores higher on the composite quality index, it carries the larger 1M context window, it captures more of the available reuse.

Verdict

Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads on quality while Claude Haiku 4.5 leads on reuse-adjusted cost. Send latency- and budget-sensitive volume to Claude Haiku 4.5 and reserve Claude Sonnet 4.6 for the hard requests. Zumik's aliases route between them automatically under policy.

Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6, answered.

Is Claude Haiku 4.5 or Claude Sonnet 4.6 cheaper?

At 55% prefix reuse, Claude Haiku 4.5 blends to about $1.63 per 1M tokens and Claude Sonnet 4.6 to about $4.89. Claude Haiku 4.5 is cheaper on that basis.

Which has the larger context window?

Claude Sonnet 4.6 has the larger window: 1M vs 200K tokens.

Which captures more reuse?

Claude Sonnet 4.6 shows higher measured cache capture (91% vs 90%) in the Zumik corpus.

Let an alias pick for you.

Route to whichever model wins under current policy automatically. Zumik resolves the alias to the best fit per request, so you never hard-code a loser.