Comprehensive side-by-side LLM comparison
GPT-5 Mini leads with 1.7% higher average benchmark score. GPT-5 Mini offers 168.8K more tokens in context window than Claude Sonnet 4.5. Claude Sonnet 4.5 is $7.00 cheaper per million tokens. Claude Sonnet 4.5 is available on 3 providers. Both models have their strengths depending on your specific coding needs.
Anthropic
Claude Sonnet 4.5, released by Anthropic in September 2025, is a large language model from the Claude 4.5 family that balances response quality and efficiency for coding, agentic tasks, and analytical work. It features a 200K token context window (extendable to 1M tokens in beta), 64K maximum output tokens, native image understanding, and extended thinking support. Sonnet 4.5 targets use cases that require a balance of throughput and reasoning depth, including code generation, data analysis, and multi-step agentic pipelines.
OpenAI
GPT-5 mini, released by OpenAI in August 2025, is a smaller variant from the GPT-5 family that inherits GPT-5's unified reasoning architecture and multimodal capabilities at a reduced inference cost. It targets high-volume production use cases requiring a balance of intelligence and response speed, offering GPT-5 capabilities for applications where full GPT-5 inference costs are a concern.
1 month newer

GPT-5 Mini
OpenAI
2025-08

Claude Sonnet 4.5
Anthropic
2025-09-29
Cost per million tokens (USD)
Claude Sonnet 4.5
GPT-5 Mini
Context window and performance specifications
Average performance across 1 common benchmarks
Claude Sonnet 4.5
GPT-5 Mini
Performance comparison across key benchmark categories
Claude Sonnet 4.5
GPT-5 Mini
Claude Sonnet 4.5
2025-01
Available providers and their performance metrics
Claude Sonnet 4.5
Anthropic
AWS Bedrock
Google Cloud Vertex AI
GPT-5 Mini
Claude Sonnet 4.5
GPT-5 Mini
Claude Sonnet 4.5
GPT-5 Mini
OpenAI