// head_to_head
Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs Switchyard
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 Sonnet 5.5 and Switchyard are priced within ~10% of each other.
Switchyard does not have a published LiveBench run, so this comparison covers price, context and declared capabilities only. A missing score means "not evaluated", not "worse" — the right way to separate these two is an eval on your own workload.
anthropic
Claude Sonnet 5.5
- Blended / 1M
- $4.00
- Context
- 1M
- Released
- Sep 28, 2026
- Overall score
- 77.8
Specs and pricing
| Metric | Claude Sonnet 5.5 | Switchyard |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 77.8 | — |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $0.0742 | — |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $4.00 | — |
| Input price / 1M | $2.00 | — |
| Output price / 1M | $10.00 | — |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.200 | — |
| Context window | 1M | 1M |
| Max output tokens | 128K | — |
Benchmarks by category
An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — Claude Sonnet 5.5 on top, Switchyard 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.
Run these two through the cost calculatorClaude Sonnet 5.5 vs Switchyard FAQ
Which is better, Claude Sonnet 5.5 or Switchyard?
Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Switchyard are priced within ~10% of each other. Switchyard does not have a published LiveBench run, so this comparison covers price, context and declared capabilities only. A missing score means "not evaluated", not "worse" — the right way to separate these two is an eval on your own workload.
Does Claude Sonnet 5.5 or Switchyard have a bigger context window?
They are effectively the same — 1M for Claude Sonnet 5.5 and 1M for Switchyard.
Do Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Switchyard support prompt caching?
Claude Sonnet 5.5 publishes a cached-input rate of $0.200 per million tokens against a full input rate of $2.00. The catalogue lists no separate cached rate for Switchyard, which means the provider does not price it separately here — not that caching is unavailable.
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 2026-06-25, 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.