Anthropic offers two compelling mid-range options: Claude Sonnet 5 (balanced, $3/$15) and Haiku 4.5 (fast, $1/$5). Choosing between them depends on your priorities for speed, capability, and cost.
Claude Sonnet 5
Sonnet 5 is Anthropic’s most popular model for development work. It offers strong coding, reasoning, and creative capabilities at a reasonable price. With a 200K context window and vision support, it handles most professional workloads effectively.
Haiku 4.5
Haiku 4.5 is Anthropic’s fastest and cheapest model. At $1/$5 per million tokens, it is ideal for high-volume tasks, simple classifications, and applications where speed matters more than absolute quality. Haiku excels at structured outputs and straightforward queries.
Choosing
Use Sonnet 5 for development, creative writing, research, and complex reasoning. Use Haiku 4.5 for customer service chatbots, content classification, data extraction, and any task where speed and cost are primary concerns. Many teams use both — Sonnet for complex tasks, Haiku for simple ones.
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