Comprehensive side-by-side LLM comparison
Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads with 45.2% higher average benchmark score. o4 mini offers 36.0K more tokens in context window than Claude Sonnet 4.6. o4 mini is $12.50 cheaper per million tokens. Claude Sonnet 4.6 is available on 3 providers. Overall, Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the stronger choice for coding tasks.
Anthropic
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is a general-purpose language model from Anthropic, released in February 2026 as an update to the Sonnet 4 line that introduced adaptive thinking — a mode where the model automatically calibrates its reasoning depth based on task complexity rather than requiring manual configuration by the developer. The model accepts text and image inputs and integrates natively with web search and code execution tools, consolidating capabilities that previously required separate toolchain setup into a unified API surface. It became the primary workhorse model in the Claude 4 series for code assistance, agentic pipelines, and retrieval-augmented applications that benefit from built-in web access.
OpenAI
OpenAI o4 mini, released by OpenAI in April 2025, is a compact reasoning model from the o4 family that combines multimodal understanding with efficient chain-of-thought processing. It features a 200K token context window and native image understanding, with strong performance on mathematics and coding benchmarks relative to its inference cost. o4 mini targets cost-sensitive applications requiring both visual reasoning and mathematical accuracy.
10 months newer

o4 mini
OpenAI
2025-04-16

Claude Sonnet 4.6
Anthropic
2026-02-17
Cost per million tokens (USD)
Claude Sonnet 4.6
o4 mini
Context window and performance specifications
Average performance across 2 common benchmarks
Claude Sonnet 4.6
o4 mini
Performance comparison across key benchmark categories
Claude Sonnet 4.6
o4 mini
Claude Sonnet 4.6
2025-08
Available providers and their performance metrics
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Anthropic
AWS Bedrock
Google Cloud Vertex AI
o4 mini
Claude Sonnet 4.6
o4 mini
Claude Sonnet 4.6
o4 mini
OpenAI