Claude Opus 5.5 vs Grok 4.5
Grok 4.5 is 2.7× cheaper for typical traffic ; Claude Opus 5.5 scores higher on the Artificial Analysis intelligence index (57.6 vs 38.8).
Prices checked Oct 21, 2026
| Claude Opus 5.5 | Grok 4.5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Developer | Anthropic | xAI |
| Input / 1M tokens | $4.00 | $2.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $20.00 | $6.00 |
| Cached input / 1M | $0.20 | $0.30 |
| Context window | 1M | 500K |
| Max output | 128K | 450K |
| Intelligence index | 57.6 | 38.8 |
| Image input | Yes | Yes |
| Tool calling | Yes | Yes |
| Reasoning mode | Yes | Yes |
| Open weights | No | No |
Monthly cost for common workloads
| Workload | Claude Opus 5.5 | Grok 4.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Customer chatbot 1,000 conversations a day, 8 turns each | $2,299 | $857 |
| Document Q&A (RAG) 500 questions a day over retrieved documents | $476 | $210 |
| Coding / tool-using agent 200 tasks a day, long tool-heavy contexts | $894 | $405 |
| Content generation 30 long articles a day | $55.80 | $18.90 |
| Classification / extraction 100,000 short items a day | $4,500 | $2,070 |
Estimates include cached-input discounts where a model offers them. Try your own numbers in the cost calculator.
Which one to choose
- Lowest cost: Grok 4.5 — 2.7× cheaper on a 3:1 input/output mix.
- Longer documents: Claude Opus 5.5 reads up to 1M tokens at once.