Claude Sonnet 5
Claude Sonnet 5
The coding workhorse: near the top on real software tasks, at a working price.
Updated
The read
Sonnet 5 is what most coding agents actually run on, and the benchmark gap to the tier above it is smaller than the price gap. It applies patches that compile, follows a repository's existing conventions, and holds up over the long tool-calling chains that agent frameworks generate. Anthropic has been discounting it, so check the current rate before you build a budget on it.
Where it shines
- Among the strongest models on verified software engineering tasks
- Priced to run continuously rather than occasionally
- Reliable tool calling over long chains, which is what breaks weaker models
Worth knowing first
- Current pricing is promotional and rises on a published date
- Gives up real ground to Opus on the hardest architectural reasoning
Index score
87.9
Provisional. This score is read from the product's public capability, not from the one-prompt rebuild the fully reviewed entries went through, so treat it as a placing rather than a verdict.
- Rank
- 04 of 53
- Builds
- LLMs
- Category
- Coding
- Output
- Text, code and tool calls over an API
- Pricing
- Paid only
- Best for
- Coding agents and editor integrations at scale
Scores are our own editorial judgement, weighted craft 55, speed 10, control 15 and value 20.
Also worth a look
Full index- 10MiniMax M3MiniMax M3ProvisionalOpen weights tuned for software work, and the fastest decoding of anything in its class.Coding modelFree tier84.5
- 18Step 3.7 FlashStep 3.7 FlashProvisionalAn Apache-licensed vision model built for coding agents, and it routes work rather than brute-forcing it.Coding modelFree tier81.6
- 43Mercury 2Mercury 2ProvisionalA diffusion model for text, and it is several times faster than anything built the usual way.Coding modelPaid only73.2
