Claude 3.5 Haiku vs Claude 3 Opus

Side-by-side comparison of Claude 3.5 Haiku (Anthropic) and Claude 3 Opus (Anthropic). Exact API pricing per million tokens, context windows, output speed, and total cost on real-world prompts.

Specifications

Spec Claude 3.5 Haiku Claude 3 Opus
Provider Anthropic Anthropic
Model id claude-3.5-haiku claude-3-opus
Input price (per 1M tokens) $0.80 $15.00
Output price (per 1M tokens) $4.00 $75.00
Context window 200,000 200,000
Output speed (tokens/sec) ~120 ~25

Cost on real prompts

Total cost = (input tokens × input price) + (output tokens × output price). Numbers below use the exact pricing tables published by each provider.

Scenario Input Output Claude 3.5 Haiku Claude 3 Opus Cheaper
Short question + answer 50 150 $0.00064 $0.012000 Claude 3.5 Haiku
Code review on one file 500 1,500 $0.006400 $0.120000 Claude 3.5 Haiku
Long document summary 5,000 500 $0.006000 $0.112500 Claude 3.5 Haiku
Heavy reasoning task 2,000 8,000 $0.033600 $0.630000 Claude 3.5 Haiku
Full codebase analysis 50,000 10,000 $0.080000 $1.50 Claude 3.5 Haiku

Want the exact cost for your prompt instead of these examples? Open the cost calculator pre-loaded with both models →

When to pick which

Heuristics derived from the spec table above. Always validate on your own prompts before committing — these are starting points, not verdicts.

Pick Claude 3.5 Haiku for

  • output-heavy workloads (long-form generation, code, summaries) — claude-3.5-haiku is meaningfully cheaper per output token
  • input-heavy workloads (long context, RAG, document QA) — claude-3.5-haiku is cheaper per input token
  • latency-sensitive UX (chat, autocompletion) — claude-3.5-haiku streams faster (~120 vs ~25 tok/s)

Pick Claude 3 Opus for

No clear advantage on the data points we measure. Compare on your actual prompts.

Switching between them

For most use cases, switching providers means updating the model id and the request shape if the providers differ. Within the same provider, it's usually a single-line change.

From Claude 3.5 Haiku to Claude 3 Opus

# Before
model = "claude-3.5-haiku"

# After
model = "claude-3-opus"

If the providers differ (Anthropic vs Anthropic), you'll also need to swap the SDK / endpoint URL. Cross-provider migrations usually take 30 minutes to a few hours depending on how many features (streaming, function calling, tool use) you depend on.

Calculate cost on your own prompt

The examples above use generic input/output ratios. For an exact comparison, paste your real prompt into the calculator — it counts tokens with the right tokenizer for each model and shows side-by-side cost.

Open the calculator with both models →