Comprehensive side-by-side LLM comparison
Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads with 42.2% higher average benchmark score. Claude Sonnet 4.5 offers 116.5K more tokens in context window than Grok 3 mini. Grok 3 mini is $17.20 cheaper per million tokens. Claude Sonnet 4.5 supports multimodal inputs. Claude Sonnet 4.5 is available on 3 providers. Overall, Claude Sonnet 4.5 is the stronger choice for coding tasks.
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.
xAI
Grok 3 mini, released by xAI alongside Grok 3 in February 2025, is a compact reasoning model from the Grok 3 family featuring RL-enhanced Think mode for extended chain-of-thought processing. It features a 131K token context window and targets STEM tasks, mathematics, and coding applications where cost-efficient reasoning with configurable depth is required.
7 months newer

Grok 3 mini
xAI
2025-02-17

Claude Sonnet 4.5
Anthropic
2025-09-29
Cost per million tokens (USD)
Claude Sonnet 4.5
Grok 3 mini
Context window and performance specifications
Average performance across 1 common benchmarks
Claude Sonnet 4.5
Grok 3 mini
Performance comparison across key benchmark categories
Claude Sonnet 4.5
Grok 3 mini
Claude Sonnet 4.5
2025-01
Available providers and their performance metrics
Claude Sonnet 4.5
Anthropic
AWS Bedrock
Google Cloud Vertex AI
Grok 3 mini
Claude Sonnet 4.5
Grok 3 mini
Claude Sonnet 4.5
Grok 3 mini
xAI