Cheaper alternatives to Claude Opus 4.5

Anthropic LMArena 1449.8 $10.00/M on a balanced workload prices as of 2026-08-28

14 models are both better and cheaper, giving up nothing.

Of the 133 models carrying both an independent score and a published price at the same delivery mode, 22 score at least as high as Claude Opus 4.5 and cost no more under at least one workload. 18 of them are genuinely cheaper; the rest match the price and win on score alone. 14 match or beat it on every capability we hold — context, maximum output, input modes, tool use and extended reasoning. 8 do not, and every row names what it drops.

Dominance is not a property of a model. It is a property of a model, a capability lens and a workload, and all three are named on every row. Scores are LMArena Elo, used under CC BY 4.0 from the official dataset; prices are blended per million tokens. A higher score is not a drop-in replacement.

This page is built from that comparison and nothing else. When no model is both better and cheaper than Claude Opus 4.5, it is not generated.

Where it holds

Workload	Claude Opus 4.5 $/M	Better and cheaper	With a trade
Balanced	$10.00	14	8
Summarise	$4.72	14	8
Chat	$11.65	14	8
Code gen	$16.64	14	8
Agentic	$5.32	14	8

Workload mixes are defined on the methodology page. Cached input is priced at the cached rate, and reasoning tokens at the worse of the reasoning and output rates.

What you would be replacing

Intelligence	1449.8
Context window	200K
Max output	64K
Input modes	file, image, text
Tool use	yes
Extended reasoning	yes

A replacement has to clear every line above, not just the score. Full record for Claude Opus 4.5.

Better and cheaper, nothing given up 14

Each of these matches or beats Claude Opus 4.5 on context, maximum output, input modes, tool use and reasoning, scores at least as high, and costs no more.

#	Model	Intelligence	$/M	Holds under
1	Claude Opus 5 Anthropic	1504.2 +54.4	$10.00	Balanced same price Summarise same price Chat same price Code gen same price Agentic same price
2	Claude Opus 4.6 Anthropic	1502.7 +52.9	$10.00	Balanced same price Summarise same price Chat same price Code gen same price Agentic same price
3	Gemini 3.7 Flash Google	1490.2 +40.4	$0.750	Balanced −93% Summarise −93% Chat −92% Code gen −93% Agentic −92%
4	Claude Opus 4.7 Anthropic	1490.1 +40.3	$10.00	Balanced same price Summarise same price Chat same price Code gen same price Agentic same price
5	Gemini 3.5 Flash Google	1482.6 +32.8	$3.38	Balanced −66% Summarise −68% Chat −65% Code gen −65% Agentic −66%
6	Muse Spark 1.1 Meta	1478.3 +28.5	$2.00	Balanced −80% Summarise −77% Chat −82% Code gen −82% Agentic −80%
7	Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Google	1479.5 +29.7	$4.50	Balanced −55% Summarise −58% Chat −53% Code gen −53% Agentic −54%
8	Gemini 3.6 Flash Google	1476.5 +26.7	$1.50	Balanced −85% Summarise −85% Chat −85% Code gen −85% Agentic −85%
9	GPT-5.4 OpenAI	1469.6 +19.8	$5.63	Balanced −44% Summarise −47% Chat −41% Code gen −41% Agentic −43%
10	Gemini 2.5 Pro Google	1457.3 tie	$3.44	Balanced −66% Summarise −71% Chat −62% Code gen −61% Agentic −64%
11	Claude Sonnet 4.6 Anthropic	1457.6 tie	$6.00	Balanced −40% Summarise −40% Chat −40% Code gen −40% Agentic −40%
12	Claude Opus 4.8 Anthropic	1460.9 +11.1	$10.00	Balanced same price Summarise same price Chat same price Code gen same price Agentic same price
13	GPT-5.6 Sol OpenAI	1454.2 tie	$4.00	Balanced −60% Summarise −60% Chat −60% Code gen −60% Agentic −60%
14	Grok 4.5 xAI	1452.3 tie	$3.00	Balanced −70% Summarise −64% Chat −73% Code gen −74% Agentic −70%

Cheaper and higher-scoring, but you give something up 8

These score at least as high and cost no more on the two plotted axes, and lose something that is not on them. Read the last column before switching.

Model	Intelligence	$/M	Holds under	What you give up
Qwen3.8 Max Qwen	1481.9 +32.1	$3.00	Balanced −70% Summarise −64% Chat −74% Code gen −74% Agentic −71%	no file input
GLM 5.3 Z.ai	1476.9 +27.1	$2.15	Balanced −78% Summarise −74% Chat −81% Code gen −81% Agentic −78%	no file, image input
Kimi K3 Moonshot AI	1476.3 +26.5	$6.00	Balanced −40% Summarise −40% Chat −40% Code gen −40% Agentic −40%	no file input
MiMo-V2.5-Pro Xiaomi	1465 +15.2	$0.544	Balanced −95% Summarise −93% Chat −96% Code gen −96% Agentic −95%	no file, image input
GLM 5.2 Z.ai	1465.4 +15.6	$1.83	Balanced −82% Summarise −78% Chat −84% Code gen −84% Agentic −81%	no file, image input
GLM 5.1 Z.ai	1464.1 +14.3	$1.94	Balanced −81% Summarise −77% Chat −83% Code gen −83% Agentic −80%	no file, image input
Qwen3.7 Plus Qwen	1456.2 tie	$0.560	Balanced −94% Summarise −94% Chat −95% Code gen −95% Agentic −94%	no file input
Kimi K2.6 Moonshot AI	1455 tie	$1.71	Balanced −83% Summarise −81% Chat −83% Code gen −84% Agentic −82%	no file input

What this compares, and what it leaves out

Quality is LMArena Elo, used under CC BY 4.0 from the official dataset. The 95% confidence interval on a difference between two scores is about ±10.68 points, so a gap smaller than that is marked tie rather than an improvement — see significance bands.
188 further models at this delivery mode carry a price but no independent score. They are absent from the comparison in both directions — unrated is not a zero, and an unmeasured model is neither an alternative nor a worse buy.
Retired models are never offered as an alternative, and a model only competes against its own delivery mode: batch trades latency for price, so it is not a like-for-like swap.
Nothing here measures latency, throughput, rate limits or how a model behaves on your prompts. Two models with the same index score are not interchangeable.
The models that nothing beats on both axes are on the value frontier, and every other model something cheaper beats is listed here.