// head_to_head
Claude Opus 4.8 vs Muse Spark Open
Published LiveBench scores across all seven categories, live list pricing, context windows, and the measured cost of a point of capability — for both models, side by side.
Claude Opus 4.8 scores higher, Muse Spark Open costs less — it depends on your workload.
Claude Opus 4.8 is ahead by 19.2 points overall, and Muse Spark Open lists 5.0× cheaper per blended million tokens. Whether 19.2 points is worth that depends on how much a wrong answer costs you.
anthropic
Claude Opus 4.8
- Blended / 1M
- $10.00
- Context
- 1M
- Released
- May 27, 2026
- Overall score
- 76.8
meta
Muse Spark Open
- Blended / 1M
- $2.00
- Context
- 1.0M
- Released
- Oct 15, 2026
- Overall score
- 57.6
Specs and pricing
| Metric | Claude Opus 4.8 | Muse Spark Open |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 76.8win | 57.6 |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $2.98 | — |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $10.00 | $2.00win |
| Input price / 1M | $5.00 | $1.25win |
| Output price / 1M | $25.00 | $4.25win |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.500 | $0.150win |
| Context window | 1M | 1.0M |
| Max output tokens | 128K | 944Kwin |
Benchmarks by category
An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — Claude Opus 4.8 on top, Muse Spark Open below, both out of 100.
What each one costs to run
Per-token prices are hard to feel. These are monthly list costs for both models across five workload shapes, using each provider's published cached-input rate where there is one.
| Workload | Claude Opus 4.8 | Muse Spark Open |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $2,876/mo | $560.80/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $3,700/mo | $815.00/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $3,480/mo | $724.00/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $6,650/mo | $1,514/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $12,750/mo | $3,000/mo |
Which should you pick?
Quality matters more than the bill
Claude Opus 4.8
Highest overall LiveBench score of the two at 76.8.
The workload is coding or agentic work
Claude Opus 4.8
Leads on coding — 77.3 against 73.6.
You are cost-constrained
Muse Spark Open
Cheaper on blended list price at $2.00 per million tokens.
Claude Opus 4.8 vs Muse Spark Open FAQ
Which is better, Claude Opus 4.8 or Muse Spark Open?
Claude Opus 4.8 scores higher, Muse Spark Open costs less — it depends on your workload. Claude Opus 4.8 is ahead by 19.2 points overall, and Muse Spark Open lists 5.0× cheaper per blended million tokens. Whether 19.2 points is worth that depends on how much a wrong answer costs you.
Is Claude Opus 4.8 cheaper than Muse Spark Open?
Muse Spark Open is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, Claude Opus 4.8 lists at $10.00 per million tokens and Muse Spark Open at $2.00 — Muse Spark Open is 5.0× cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — Claude Opus 4.8 charges $5.00 in and $25.00 out, Muse Spark Open charges $1.25 and $4.25 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.
Claude Opus 4.8 vs Muse Spark Open: which scores higher on benchmarks?
Claude Opus 4.8 scores 76.8 and Muse Spark Open scores 57.6 overall on LiveBench, the mean of its seven categories. That is a 19.2-point lead for Claude Opus 4.8. Category scores differ from the overall figure — a model can lead on reasoning and trail on coding, which the per-category table above breaks out.
Does Claude Opus 4.8 or Muse Spark Open have a bigger context window?
They are effectively the same — 1M for Claude Opus 4.8 and 1.0M for Muse Spark Open.
Do Claude Opus 4.8 and Muse Spark Open support prompt caching?
Both publish a cached-input rate: $0.500 per million for Claude Opus 4.8 and $0.150 for Muse Spark Open, against full input rates of $5.00 and $1.25. On a workload with a long stable prefix — a system prompt, a tool schema, a retrieved corpus — that changes the economics more than the headline price does.
Related comparisons
How these numbers are produced
- Price — provider list price from OpenRouter, refreshed every 15 minutes. “Blended” is a 3:1 input:output mix.
- Scores — LiveBench release 2026-09-02, using their own category map. Each model shows its strongest published run. A blank means “not evaluated”, never “bad”.
- Cost per point — the measured dollars LiveBench spent on the run, divided by the score it earned.
- “Win” — awarded only past a threshold: one full point on a benchmark score, 10% on a price, 25% on a context window. Anything tighter reports as a tie, because effort settings alone move a LiveBench score by more than that.
Published benchmarks rank models on someone else's tasks. Before committing, see LLM & agent evaluation for building an eval on your own.