Claude Sonnet 4 vs GPT-4 1: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Pricing verified Apr 20, 2026By LLMversusUpdated June 14, 2026View methodology

⚡ Quick Answer

GPT-4.1 is significantly cheaper at $2.00/$8.00 per million tokens vs $3.00/$15.00. GPT-4.1 offers a larger 1048K context window vs 200K.

Updated: April 20, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureClaude Sonnet 4GPT-4 1
ProviderAnthropicOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$3.00$2.00
Output Price / 1M tokens$15.00$8.00
Context Window
200K
8.192K
Max Output Tokens
64,000
2,048
Arena ELO
1,280
1,200
Coding ELO
1,305
1,210
TTFT (ms)
320
160
Tokens/sec
78
85
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesNo
When to Use Claude Sonnet 4

Choose Claude Sonnet 4 when you need: best-in-class coding performance, 200k context window, excellent instruction following. It excels at coding, analysis, long-context, agents tasks.

Strengths:

  • Best-in-class coding performance
  • 200K context window
  • Excellent instruction following

Best for:

codinganalysislong-contextagents
When to Use GPT-4 1

Choose GPT-4.1 when you need: 1m token context window, excellent coding performance, strong instruction following, competitive pricing for its capability. It excels at coding, long-context, agents, general-purpose tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two. Its 1048K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • Good quality
  • Affordable
  • Reliable

Best for:

general-purposecoding

Frequently Asked Questions

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