CLAUDE.md · price reverts to £5
| Feature | Claude (Anthropic) | GPT-4o (OpenAI) |
|---|---|---|
| Best model (May 2026) | Claude Sonnet 4.6 / Opus 4.7 | GPT-4o (May 2024) |
| Context window | 200,000 tokens (~150K words) | 128,000 tokens (~96K words) |
| Coding ability | Exceptional (SWE-bench top) | Very good |
| Multi-file reasoning | Excellent | Good |
| Math / STEM | Very good | Slightly stronger on math |
| Image input (vision) | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Image generation | ✗ No | ✓ DALL-E 3 |
| Real-time web access | ✗ No (API) | ✗ No (API) |
| Prompt caching | ✓ Up to 90% savings | ✗ Not available |
| Extended thinking | ✓ Yes (Claude 3.7+) | ✗ No |
| Safety approach | Constitutional AI | RLHF + content policy |
| API input price (mid-tier) | $3.00 / 1M tokens | $2.50 / 1M tokens |
| API output price (mid-tier) | $15.00 / 1M tokens | $10.00 / 1M tokens |
| Cheap tier (input) | $0.80 / 1M (Haiku 4.5) | $0.15 / 1M (GPT-4o mini) |
| Max rate limit | 4,000 RPM (Tier 4) | 10,000 RPM (Tier 5) |
| Streaming | ✓ | ✓ |
| Function/tool calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| ChatGPT consumer product | ✗ | ✓ 200M users |
| Consumer product | ✓ Claude.ai | ✓ ChatGPT |
| Model | Input (per 1M tok) | Output (per 1M tok) | Context |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $0.80 | $4.00 | 200K |
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 Popular | $3.00 | $15.00 | 200K |
| Claude Opus 4.7 Best | $15.00 | $75.00 | 200K |
| GPT-4o mini | $0.15 | $0.60 | 128K |
| GPT-4o Popular | $2.50 | $10.00 | 128K |
| GPT-4 Turbo | $10.00 | $30.00 | 128K |
Claude prompt caching (cache read): 10% of input price. Effective cost with caching can be <$0.40/M for cached tokens. See Claude Cost Calculator for exact estimates.
For developers and teams, Claude is the better default in 2026. The 200K context window, superior long-form coding ability, and prompt caching make it a stronger choice for real production workloads. GPT-4o is a legitimate alternative — especially if you need image generation or are building on the ChatGPT ecosystem. For pure cost optimization at scale, GPT-4o mini is significantly cheaper than anything Claude offers at the low end. Use our token pricing calculator to estimate your specific workload.
Is Claude better than GPT-4 for coding?
For complex, multi-file coding tasks, Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.7 generally outperform GPT-4o. Claude produces more idiomatic code, hallucinates API names less frequently, and handles larger codebases in a single context. For quick autocomplete or simple snippets, the gap is smaller. Claude Code (the agentic terminal tool) also outpaces Copilot for full-project tasks.
Which is cheaper: Claude API or GPT-4o API?
It depends on your use case. GPT-4o mini ($0.15/M input) is far cheaper than Claude Haiku 4.5 ($0.80/M) for high-volume simple tasks. At the mid tier, they're comparable — Claude Sonnet ($3/M) vs GPT-4o ($2.50/M). Claude's prompt caching advantage can make it cheaper if you reuse system prompts heavily. Use the cost calculator to compare for your usage pattern.
Does Claude have a larger context window than GPT-4?
Yes. Claude supports 200,000 tokens (~150,000 words) vs GPT-4o's 128,000 tokens (~96,000 words). For reference, 200K tokens can hold roughly the entire codebase of a medium-sized Node.js project. This makes Claude significantly better for analyzing large repos, long research papers, or extensive contract review.
Can Claude generate images like GPT-4?
No. As of May 2026, Claude does not have native image generation capability via the API. GPT-4o can generate images through DALL-E 3 in ChatGPT, but this isn't available via the base GPT-4o API either. For image gen, you'd need OpenAI's Images API separately.
Which AI is better for long documents?
Claude wins clearly for long-document tasks. The 200K context window combined with its reliable instruction-following makes it the best choice for contract review, research paper analysis, large codebase Q&A, and book-length summarization.