Cost and performance comparison
Claude Opus 5 vs Claude Opus 5.5
Model AAnthropic
Claude Opus 5
- Cost / 1M Tokens
- $11.00
- 70% in · 30% out mix
- ≈ $15.73 for the same text, tokenizer included
- Value Index (score÷cost)
- 6.2
- Higher = better value
- Speed
- 63/100
- Context
- 1.0M
- Tier
- Power Tier
List price from the Anthropic pricing page, verified October 12, 2026.
Its tokenizer produces about 43% more tokens than OpenAI's for the same text, so the real cost runs higher than the list price suggests. This is an estimate: the tokenizer has not been measured yet.
Check the sourceModel BAnthropic
Claude Opus 5.5
- Cost / 1M Tokens
- $8.80
- 70% in · 30% out mix
- ≈ $12.58 for the same text, tokenizer included
- Value Index (score÷cost)
- 7.9
- Higher = better value
- Speed
- 66/100
- Context
- 1.0M
- Tier
- Power Tier
List price from the Anthropic pricing page, verified October 12, 2026.
Its tokenizer produces about 43% more tokens than OpenAI's for the same text, so the real cost runs higher than the list price suggests. This is an estimate: the tokenizer has not been measured yet.
Check the sourceIn-depth analysis
Claude Opus 5 vs Claude Opus 5.5: Detailed Comparison
Claude Opus 5 is Anthropic's flagship-tier language model with a 1.0M-token context window, excelling at coding. Claude Opus 5.5 from Anthropic is a flagship-tier model supporting 1.0M tokens in context, with standout performance in coding.
Claude Opus 5.5 is both the cheaper and the stronger model here — for the same text it costs 20% less than Claude Opus 5 and still leads on combined coding and reasoning by 1 points. There is no tradeoff to weigh on this pair: unless you need something specific from Claude Opus 5, the cheaper model is simply the better one. Claude Opus 5 is priced at $5.00/M input tokens and $25.00/M output tokens. Claude Opus 5.5 costs $4.00/M input and $20.00/M output.
On iOPTERA's editorial scores, Claude Opus 5.5 leads with 99/100 for coding and 99/100 for reasoning, against Claude Opus 5's 99/100 and 98/100.
Capability breakdown
Across the five core benchmark categories, here is how Claude Opus 5 and Claude Opus 5.5 stack up head to head:
Best model by task
- reasoning: Claude Opus 5.5 wins with 99/100
- data extraction: Claude Opus 5.5 wins with 97/100
- creative tasks: Claude Opus 5.5 wins with 97/100
- vision/multimodal: Claude Opus 5.5 wins with 96/100
Estimated monthly cost at scale
For 10M + 2M tokens of text a month (counted the way OpenAI's tokenizer counts), Claude Opus 5 runs about $143.00 while Claude Opus 5.5 runs about $114.40 — Claude Opus 5.5 saves roughly $28.60 (20%) every month.
What actually decides it
Both models come from Anthropic, so they share a tokenizer, an API surface, and a billing account. Switching between them is a model-string change and nothing else — no new SDK, no re-tokenizing your prompts to re-estimate cost, no second vendor to onboard. That makes routing between them far cheaper to implement than a cross-vendor split.
Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Opus 5 were released within 2 months of each other, so they are competing on the same evaluations under roughly the same conditions. That makes a direct benchmark comparison meaningful here in a way it usually is not — neither model has the advantage of being measured on a newer, easier set of tests.
Context is effectively a tie: 1.0M against 1.0M. Neither model unlocks a document size the other cannot handle, so this axis should not enter the decision. If you were hoping context would break the tie for you, it will not.
Throughput is close enough to ignore — 66/100 versus 63/100. Neither model will feel noticeably quicker in an interactive product, so latency is not a reason to choose between them.
Claude Opus 5.5 wins this comparison outright — cheaper and stronger. Choose Claude Opus 5 only if it has a specific capability you need; on price and benchmarks it is behind on both.
What you actually pay
The list price is only the start. Prompt caching, batch processing and long prompts change the bill, and each provider sets them differently. Prices per 1M tokens.
| Pricing term | Claude Opus 5 | Claude Opus 5.5 |
|---|---|---|
| List price (input / output) | $5.00 / $25.00 | $4.00 / $20.00 |
| Cached input | $0.5010% of the input price | $0.205% of the input price |
| Batch API | 50% off input and output | 50% off input and output |
| Long prompts | No surcharge across the 1M window | No surcharge across the 1M window |
| Input with 80% cache hits | $1.40 | $0.96 |
With 80% of input served from the cache, Claude Opus 5.5 costs 31% less than Claude Opus 5 for the same input text, counting each model's tokenizer.The tokenizer factor for Claude Opus 5, Claude Opus 5.5 is our estimate until it is measured.
The last row assumes 80% of input tokens are read from the cache, as in a chat app that re-sends a long system prompt or RAG over the same documents. Cache-write and storage charges are not included.
Claude also bills cache writes: 1.25× the input price for a 5-minute cache, 2× for one hour.
Checked on October 8, 2026 against the pricing pages of Anthropic.
Capability scores
iOPTERA editorial scores across 5 categories — informed by public benchmarks, not measured by us
Coding
Reasoning
Extraction
Creative
Vision
Speed Score
Context Window
What Is a Token?
Models don't read words — they process tokens.
A token is roughly 4 characters of English text (~¾ of a word). Your API bill is priced per million tokens — understanding this directly reduces your costs.
Short phrase
"Hello, world!"
- Claude Opus 5
- $2.86
- Claude Opus 5.5
- $2.29
Business email
One typical email (~200 words)
- Claude Opus 5
- $193.05
- Claude Opus 5.5
- $154.44
Code file
50-line Python script
- Claude Opus 5
- $286.00
- Claude Opus 5.5
- $228.80
Prices shown are for 100,000 runs of each workload — one run costs a fraction of a cent on both Claude Opus 5 and Claude Opus 5.5, so the number only becomes meaningful at production volume. Input tokens only; add your output volume in the calculator below.
How to check your token usage
response.usage.total_tokensEvery API response includes a usage object. Sum total_tokens across all calls to get your monthly figure, then use the calculator below.
Your Cost Calculator
Enter your actual monthly token usage to see real savings
Quick Presets
Claude Opus 5
$471.90/mo
$5,662.80/yr
Claude Opus 5.5
$377.52/mo
$4,530.24/yr
Annual Savings
$1,132.56 saved per year
Claude Opus 5.5 cheaper · $94.38/mo
Related Comparisons
Explore similar model pairs to find your best fit
Claude OpusvsClaude Fable
$5.00 · $10.00/M input
Claude OpusvsGPT-5.6 Sol
$5.00 · $4.00/M input
Claude OpusvsClaude Opus
$5.00 · $5.00/M input
Claude OpusvsClaude Opus
$5.00 · $5.00/M input
Claude OpusvsGPT-5.6 Terra
$5.00 · $2.00/M input
Claude OpusvsClaude Sonnet
$5.00 · $2.00/M input
Claude OpusvsClaude Fable
$4.00 · $10.00/M input
Claude OpusvsGPT-6 Astra
$4.00 · $10.00/M input