// head_to_head
Claude Opus 5.5 vs Inkling
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 5.5 scores higher, Inkling costs less — it depends on your workload.
Claude Opus 5.5 is ahead by 38.1 points overall, and Inkling lists 4.5× cheaper per blended million tokens. Whether 38.1 points is worth that depends on how much a wrong answer costs you. Inkling also leads on measured cost per point of capability, at $0.0179 per point.
anthropic
Claude Opus 5.5
- Blended / 1M
- $8.00
- Context
- 1M
- Released
- Sep 22, 2026
- Overall score
- 85.1
thinkingmachines
Inkling
- Blended / 1M
- $1.76
- Context
- 524K
- Released
- Jul 17, 2026
- Overall score
- 47.0
Specs and pricing
| Metric | Claude Opus 5.5 | Inkling |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Weighted mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 85.1win | 47.0 |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $0.0482 | $0.0179win |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $8.00 | $1.76win |
| Input price / 1M | $4.00 | $1.00win |
| Output price / 1M | $20.00 | $4.05win |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.200 | $0.170win |
| Context window | 1Mwin | 524K |
| Max output tokens | 128K | 472Kwin |
Benchmarks by category
An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — Claude Opus 5.5 on top, Inkling 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 5.5 | Inkling |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $2,286/mo | $504.24/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $2,880/mo | $711.00/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $2,672/mo | $659.20/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $5,310/mo | $1,262/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $10,100/mo | $2,490/mo |
Which should you pick?
You are running this at volume
Inkling
Lowest measured cost per point of capability at $0.0179 per point — the gap compounds with every request.
Quality matters more than the bill
Claude Opus 5.5
Highest overall LiveBench score of the two at 85.1.
The workload is coding or agentic work
Claude Opus 5.5
Leads on long-horizon agentic — 72.8 against 8.5.
You need to fit large documents in one call
Claude Opus 5.5
Wider context window — 1M against 524K.
Claude Opus 5.5 vs Inkling FAQ
Which is better, Claude Opus 5.5 or Inkling?
Claude Opus 5.5 scores higher, Inkling costs less — it depends on your workload. Claude Opus 5.5 is ahead by 38.1 points overall, and Inkling lists 4.5× cheaper per blended million tokens. Whether 38.1 points is worth that depends on how much a wrong answer costs you. Inkling also leads on measured cost per point of capability, at $0.0179 per point.
Is Claude Opus 5.5 cheaper than Inkling?
Inkling is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, Claude Opus 5.5 lists at $8.00 per million tokens and Inkling at $1.76 — Inkling is 4.5× cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — Claude Opus 5.5 charges $4.00 in and $20.00 out, Inkling charges $1.00 and $4.05 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.
Claude Opus 5.5 vs Inkling: which scores higher on benchmarks?
Claude Opus 5.5 scores 85.1 and Inkling scores 47.0 overall on LiveBench, the weighted mean of its seven categories. That is a 38.1-point lead for Claude Opus 5.5. 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.
Which gives better value for money, Claude Opus 5.5 or Inkling?
Inkling. Cost per point divides the measured dollars LiveBench spent running the benchmark by the score it earned, so it captures something token pricing misses: a reasoning model can emit many times more tokens than its per-token rate suggests. Claude Opus 5.5 works out at $0.0482 per point and Inkling at $0.0179.
Does Claude Opus 5.5 or Inkling have a bigger context window?
Claude Opus 5.5 has the larger context window: 1M for Claude Opus 5.5 against 524K for Inkling. Note that a window you can fill is not a window you should fill — retrieval quality usually degrades well before the limit, and you pay for every token you put in it.
Do Claude Opus 5.5 and Inkling support prompt caching?
Both publish a cached-input rate: $0.200 per million for Claude Opus 5.5 and $0.170 for Inkling, against full input rates of $4.00 and $1.00. 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 2026-10-25, 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.