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📊 Comparison Guide

GPT-4o vs Claude:
Cost & Performance 2026

Side-by-side pricing for every OpenAI GPT and Anthropic Claude model. Find out which wins on cost, context, and capability for your use case.

⏱ Pricing verified April 2026

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Provider Overview

OpenAI
GPT-5.4 / GPT-5 / GPT-4.1
The industry benchmark. Strong reasoning across all tiers. GPT-4.1 Nano is one of the cheapest capable models at $0.10/M. GPT-5.4 leads on raw quality.
Price range: $0.10 – $180 per 1M tokens
Anthropic
Claude Opus 4.6 / Sonnet / Haiku
Preferred by developers for instruction-following and long-context tasks. Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 both support 1M token context windows.
Price range: $0.80 – $25 per 1M tokens

Full Pricing Comparison — April 2026

Model Input (per 1M) Output (per 1M) Context Tier
GPT-5.4OpenAI $2.50 $15.00 400K Premium
GPT-5.4 ProOpenAI $30.00 $180.00 400K Premium
GPT-5OpenAI $1.25 $10.00 128K Standard
GPT-4.1OpenAI $2.00 $8.00 1M Standard
GPT-5 MiniOpenAI $0.30 $1.20 128K Mid-tier
GPT-4o miniOpenAI $0.15 $0.60 128K Budget
GPT-4.1 NanoOpenAI $0.10 $0.40 128K Budget
Claude Opus 4.6Anthropic $5.00 $25.00 1M Premium
Claude Sonnet 4.6Anthropic $3.00 $15.00 1M Standard
Claude Sonnet 4.5Anthropic $3.00 $15.00 200K Standard
Claude Haiku 4.5Anthropic $0.80 $4.00 200K Budget

When to Choose Each

✅ Choose OpenAI when
Cost-per-token matters most
GPT-4.1 Nano ($0.10/M) and GPT-4o mini ($0.15/M) undercut every Claude model. If you're running high-volume pipelines, OpenAI's budget tier wins on price.
✅ Choose Anthropic when
Long-context + instruction-following
Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 both offer 1M token windows. Claude is widely preferred for document analysis, complex instruction-following, and agent-based tasks.
✅ Choose OpenAI when
Standard-tier pricing
GPT-5 at $1.25/M input is significantly cheaper than Claude Sonnet's $3.00/M while offering comparable capability for most tasks.
✅ Choose Anthropic when
Premium benchmark performance
Claude Opus 4.6 consistently scores highest on reasoning benchmarks (MMLU: 93, HumanEval: 91). Pays off for research-grade or complex multi-step tasks.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is GPT-4o cheaper than Claude in 2026? +
It depends on the tier. GPT-4.1 Nano ($0.10/M input) undercuts Claude Haiku 4.5 ($0.80/M input) by 8x at the budget end. At the standard tier, GPT-5 ($1.25/M) is cheaper than Claude Sonnet 4.6 ($3.00/M). At premium, GPT-5.4 ($2.50/M input) is cheaper than Claude Opus 4.6 ($5.00/M). OpenAI generally wins on input price; Claude wins on context window size.
What is the cheapest GPT model in 2026? +
GPT-4.1 Nano is OpenAI's cheapest model at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.40 per million output tokens. GPT-4o mini ($0.15/$0.60 per 1M) remains very cost-effective for chat applications and is widely used in production pipelines.
What is the cheapest Claude model? +
Claude Haiku 4.5 is Anthropic's most affordable model in 2026 at $0.80/M input and $4.00/M output with a 200K context window. While more expensive than GPT-4.1 Nano, Haiku delivers higher quality for its price compared to most budget-tier models.
Which model has a larger context window? +
Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 both offer 1M token context windows. GPT-4.1 also offers 1M context. GPT-5.4 provides 400K tokens. Most budget-tier models from both providers sit at 128K–200K tokens.

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