Which is cheaper, Claude 3 Opus or Claude Opus 5?
As of August 20, 2026, Claude Opus 5 is 67% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. Claude Opus 5 costs $5.00 per million input tokens and $25.00 per million output tokens ($30.00 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). Claude 3 Opus costs $15.00 / $75.00 per million tokens ($90.00 blended). Sources: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing and https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.
How much does Claude 3 Opus vs Claude Opus 5 cost per million tokens?
Claude 3 Opus Claude API pricing from Anthropic is $15.00 input and $75.00 output per million tokens via Anthropic. Claude Opus 5 Claude API pricing from Anthropic is $5.00 input and $25.00 output per million tokens via Anthropic. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
Which is better for coding, Claude 3 Opus or Claude Opus 5?
Claude Opus 5 has a published SWE-bench Verified score of 96%. Claude 3 Opus does not have that eval on this page yet.
What is the context window for Claude 3 Opus vs Claude Opus 5?
Claude 3 Opus supports a 200K token context window, while Claude Opus 5 supports 1M tokens. Claude Opus 5 offers a larger context window. Filling a larger window bills more input tokens, so the cheaper-per-million model can still cost more on long documents.
Which model performs better on benchmarks, Claude 3 Opus or Claude Opus 5?
Claude Opus 5 leads on 5 of 5 shared benchmarks versus Claude 3 Opus's 0 wins. Check the comparison table for GPQA Diamond, SWE-bench, MMLU, HLE, and the other evals we track. Token price and benchmark score together are the usual LLM comparison, not either number alone.
Is Claude 3 Opus or Claude Opus 5 better for production use?
Both Claude 3 Opus and Claude Opus 5 are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, Claude Opus 5 has better economics on the blended 1M-in + 1M-out scale. For maximum capability, weight the benchmark table for your domain. Many production stacks route cheap models for drafts and a frontier model for the hard turn, which is usually cheaper than sending everything to the expensive API.
Can I switch between Claude 3 Opus and Claude Opus 5 in my app?
Yes. Call Claude 3 Opus through Anthropic and Claude Opus 5 through Anthropic with separate API keys, or through a gateway that already wraps both. Keep prompts in tokens, not characters, when you estimate the invoice. AnotherWrapper templates can swap providers without rewriting auth and billing.
How accurate is this Claude 3 Opus vs Claude Opus 5 pricing data?
List rates are the latest published Claude API pricing from Anthropic and Claude API pricing from Anthropic, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing and https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing. Prompt caching, batch APIs, and committed-use discounts can change the invoice. Benchmark scores are from official publications and independent evals, updated as new numbers land.
What is the output token limit for Claude 3 Opus and Claude Opus 5?
Claude 3 Opus supports up to 200K output tokens per request, while Claude Opus 5 supports up to 128K output tokens. Output tokens are usually the expensive half of API pricing, so a higher max output cap is a capability, not a discount.
Which model has better throughput, Claude 3 Opus or Claude Opus 5?
Claude 3 Opus runs at approximately 42 tokens/second while Claude Opus 5 runs at 3.437096666269855 tokens/second. Claude 3 Opus is faster in raw throughput. Throughput (tokens per second) and time-to-first-token are why two models with the same per-million-token price can still feel different in chat and agents.
How do I switch the models in this Claude 3 Opus vs Claude Opus 5 comparison?
Use the model pickers at the top of this LLM comparison. Search any model in the index and the URL updates. Open Claude 3 Opus or Claude Opus 5 from the sidebar for the single-model API pricing page, or go back to the LLM pricing table to sort by cheapest blended cost.
