// head_to_head
Claude Sonnet 5 vs Step 5 Preview
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 scores higher, Step 5 Preview costs less — it depends on your workload.
Claude Sonnet 5 is ahead by 12.6 points overall, and Step 5 Preview lists 2.8× cheaper per blended million tokens. Whether 12.6 points is worth that depends on how much a wrong answer costs you. The two cost measures disagree here, which is worth knowing: Step 5 Preview has the lower sticker price, but Claude Sonnet 5 earns each point of capability for less — $2.28 against $4.08 — because per-token rates do not predict how many tokens a model actually spends on a task.
anthropic
Claude Sonnet 5
- Blended / 1M
- $4.00
- Context
- 1M
- Released
- Jun 30, 2026
- Overall score
- 74.6
stepfun
Step 5 Preview
- Blended / 1M
- $1.43
- Context
- 1.0M
- Released
- Oct 8, 2026
- Overall score
- 62.0
Specs and pricing
| Metric | Claude Sonnet 5 | Step 5 Preview |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 74.6win | 62.0 |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $2.28win | $4.08 |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $4.00 | $1.43win |
| Input price / 1M | $2.00 | $1.00win |
| Output price / 1M | $10.00 | $2.70win |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.200 | $0.100win |
| Context window | 1M | 1.0M |
| Max output tokens | 128Kwin | 64K |
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 on top, Step 5 Preview 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 Sonnet 5 | Step 5 Preview |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $1,150/mo | $391.20/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $1,480/mo | $602.00/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $1,392/mo | $512.00/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $2,660/mo | $1,158/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $5,100/mo | $2,320/mo |
Which should you pick?
You are running this at volume
Claude Sonnet 5
Lowest measured cost per point of capability at $2.28 per point — the gap compounds with every request.
Quality matters more than the bill
Claude Sonnet 5
Highest overall LiveBench score of the two at 74.6.
The workload is coding or agentic work
Step 5 Preview
Leads on coding — 85.6 against 82.2.
Claude Sonnet 5 vs Step 5 Preview FAQ
Which is better, Claude Sonnet 5 or Step 5 Preview?
Claude Sonnet 5 scores higher, Step 5 Preview costs less — it depends on your workload. Claude Sonnet 5 is ahead by 12.6 points overall, and Step 5 Preview lists 2.8× cheaper per blended million tokens. Whether 12.6 points is worth that depends on how much a wrong answer costs you. The two cost measures disagree here, which is worth knowing: Step 5 Preview has the lower sticker price, but Claude Sonnet 5 earns each point of capability for less — $2.28 against $4.08 — because per-token rates do not predict how many tokens a model actually spends on a task.
Is Claude Sonnet 5 cheaper than Step 5 Preview?
Step 5 Preview is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, Claude Sonnet 5 lists at $4.00 per million tokens and Step 5 Preview at $1.43 — Step 5 Preview is 2.8× cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — Claude Sonnet 5 charges $2.00 in and $10.00 out, Step 5 Preview charges $1.00 and $2.70 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.
Claude Sonnet 5 vs Step 5 Preview: which scores higher on benchmarks?
Claude Sonnet 5 scores 74.6 and Step 5 Preview scores 62.0 overall on LiveBench, the mean of its seven categories. That is a 12.6-point lead for Claude Sonnet 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 Sonnet 5 or Step 5 Preview?
Claude Sonnet 5. 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 Sonnet 5 works out at $2.28 per point and Step 5 Preview at $4.08.
Does Claude Sonnet 5 or Step 5 Preview have a bigger context window?
They are effectively the same — 1M for Claude Sonnet 5 and 1.0M for Step 5 Preview.
Do Claude Sonnet 5 and Step 5 Preview support prompt caching?
Both publish a cached-input rate: $0.200 per million for Claude Sonnet 5 and $0.100 for Step 5 Preview, against full input rates of $2.00 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 2026-09-02, 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.