Claude Opus 5 vs Grok 4.5
Pricing & Specs

Anthropic vs xAI, side by side from a live registry. Specs below, then benchmark both on your own task.

$25
Claude Opus 5 output / 1M
$6
Grok 4.5 output / 1M
1M / 500K
context windows

TL;DR: On a typical task (1K input + 500 output tokens), Grok 4.5 is about 3.5x cheaper than Claude Opus 5. But per-token price is not cost per result: a cheaper model that needs more tokens, retries, or hand-holding can end up more expensive on your workload. The specs below are facts; which one is better at YOUR task is measurable, not guessable.

API Pricing: Claude Opus 5 vs Grok 4.5

TokensClaude Opus 5Grok 4.5
Input$5 / 1M$2 / 1M
Output$25 / 1M$6 / 1M
Cached input$0.5 / 1M$0.3 / 1M

What that means in practice (1K input + 500 output tokens)

1x One typical task: $0.0175 on Claude Opus 5 vs $0.0050 on Grok 4.5
1K 1,000 runs: $17.50 vs $5.00
💡 Real cost depends on how verbose each model is on YOUR prompts. Benchmark to measure actual tokens, not estimates.

Specs Compared

SpecClaude Opus 5Grok 4.5
Context window1M tokens500K tokens
Max output tokens128K tokens-
Input modalitiestext, imagetext, image
Knowledge cutoff--
Latency (measured)--
Reasoning modelYesYes
Tool / function callingYesYes
JSON modeYesYes
Prompt cachingYesYes

When to Choose Which

High volume on a budget: start with Grok 4.5; only pay for Claude Opus 5 if the benchmark shows a quality gap that matters.
Long documents or big codebases: Claude Opus 5 has the larger context window (1M vs 500K tokens).
Everything else: the honest answer is to benchmark both on your actual task. Quality differences are task-specific and shift with every release.

FAQ

Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 5 or Grok 4.5?

Claude Opus 5 costs $5/$25 per 1M input/output tokens; Grok 4.5 costs $2/$6. On a typical task (1K input + 500 output tokens), Grok 4.5 is about 3.5x cheaper than Claude Opus 5.

Which has the bigger context window, Claude Opus 5 or Grok 4.5?

Claude Opus 5 has a 1M-token context window; Grok 4.5 has 500K tokens.

Is Claude Opus 5 better than Grok 4.5?

It depends on the task. Generic leaderboards won't tell you which one wins on YOUR workload. OpenMark lets you benchmark Claude Opus 5 and Grok 4.5 head to head on your own task with real API calls, no API keys needed, free tier available.

Claude Opus 5 or Grok 4.5 for YOUR Task?

Spec tables can't answer that. Run both head to head on your actual workload:
real API calls, ranked results with accuracy, cost, and latency. Free tier available.

Benchmark Both Free →

Get the monthly model change report

New models, API price changes, and retirements, straight from the registry that powers OpenMark. One email a month.