// head_to_head
Sonar Deep Research vs SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5
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.
SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5 is the cheaper of the two; neither can be ranked on quality here.
Sonar Deep Research 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.
perplexity
Sonar Deep Research
- Blended / 1M
- $3.50
- Context
- 128K
- Released
- Mar 7, 2025
- Overall score
- Not evaluated
x-ai
SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5
- Blended / 1M
- $3.00
- Context
- 500K
- Released
- Jul 8, 2026
- Overall score
- 75.8
Specs and pricing
| Metric | Sonar Deep Research | SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | — | 75.8 |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | — | $0.0720 |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $3.50 | $3.00win |
| Input price / 1M | $2.00 | $2.00 |
| Output price / 1M | $8.00 | $6.00win |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | — | $0.300 |
| Context window | 128K | 500Kwin |
| Max output tokens | 115K | 450Kwin |
Benchmarks by category
An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — Sonar Deep Research on top, SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5 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 | Sonar Deep Research | SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $1,120/mo | $837.60/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $2,080/mo | $1,280/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $2,240/mo | $1,128/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $2,600/mo | $2,365/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $5,800/mo | $4,750/mo |
Which should you pick?
You need to fit large documents in one call
SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5
Wider context window — 500K against 128K.
Sonar Deep Research vs SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5 FAQ
Which is better, Sonar Deep Research or SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5?
SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5 is the cheaper of the two; neither can be ranked on quality here. Sonar Deep Research 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.
Is Sonar Deep Research cheaper than SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5?
SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5 is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, Sonar Deep Research lists at $3.50 per million tokens and SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5 at $3.00 — SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5 is 17% cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — Sonar Deep Research charges $2.00 in and $8.00 out, SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5 charges $2.00 and $6.00 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.
Does Sonar Deep Research or SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5 have a bigger context window?
SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5 has the larger context window: 128K for Sonar Deep Research against 500K for SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5. 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 Sonar Deep Research and SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5 support prompt caching?
SpaceXAI: Grok 4.5 publishes a cached-input rate of $0.300 per million tokens against a full input rate of $2.00. The catalogue lists no separate cached rate for Sonar Deep Research, 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.