Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 and xAI's Grok 4.6 Mini.
| Metric | Claude Sonnet 5 | Grok 4.6 Mini | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | Anthropic | xAI | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $2.00 | $0.40 | Grok 4.6 Mini (80% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.20 | $0.10 | Grok 4.6 Mini lower |
| Output / 1M | $10.00 | $1.60 | Grok 4.6 Mini lower |
| Context Window | 1M | 512k | Claude Sonnet 5 (1M) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 16.4k | 64k | Grok 4.6 Mini |
| Tokenizer Family | Anthropic Claude BPE (~65k vocabulary) | OpenAI o200k_base legacy (200k vocabulary) | — |
| Workload (per month) | Claude Sonnet 5 | Grok 4.6 Mini |
|---|---|---|
| Chatbot10k requests · 500 in / 200 out | $30.00 | $5.20 |
| RAG app100k requests · 8,000 in / 1,200 out | $2,800.00 | $512.00 |
| Coding agent100k requests · 12,000 in / 2,000 out | $4,400.00 | $800.00 |
Standard rates, no caching or batch discounts. Model your own numbers below.
Opt for Claude Sonnet 5 when your engineering requirements prioritize Anthropic's ecosystem, specific tokenizer efficiencies (Calibrated Claude Tokenizer (±3%)), or when your expected prompt-to-completion ratios favor its $2/M input rate.
Opt for Grok 4.6 Mini when looking for xAI's tooling integration, specific context window depth (512k tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $1.6/M rate.
At a typical 3:1 input-to-output token mix, Grok 4.6 Mini is about 83% cheaper than Claude Sonnet 5. Claude Sonnet 5 costs $2 per 1M input and $10 per 1M output tokens; Grok 4.6 Mini costs $0.4 and $1.6.
Claude Sonnet 5 has the larger context window: 1M tokens vs 512k.
Claude Sonnet 5: yes, cached input costs $0.2/1M. Grok 4.6 Mini: yes, cached input costs $0.1/1M.