Head-to-head
Llama 4 (Scout / Maverick) vs Claude Sonnet 5: which AI model wins in 2026?
Llama 4 (Scout / Maverick) ($0.60/1M out (Maverick, hosted)) and Claude Sonnet 5 ($15/1M out ($10 intro until 2026-08-31)) are two of the most-used AI models in 2026. Across 3 community votes, Claude Sonnet 5 leads with 57% approval.
Quick verdict
On Reasoning, pick Claude Sonnet 5: the arena rates it 4.5/5 against 2.5/5 for Llama 4 (Scout / Maverick). On budget, Llama 4 (Scout / Maverick) wins: it starts at $0.60/1M out (Maverick, hosted) versus $15/1M out ($10 intro until 2026-08-31) for Claude Sonnet 5.
Line-by-line comparison
Strengths and weaknesses
Llama 4 (Scout / Maverick)
- MoE efficiency: only 17B active parameters per token (Scout 109B/16 experts, Maverick 400B/128 experts), giving near GPT-4o-class chat at a fraction of the compute
- Very cheap hosted inference: Maverick from about $0.15/1M in and $0.60/1M out; Scout from about $0.10/$0.30 on DeepInfra or $0.11/$0.34 on Groq
- Native early-fusion multimodality (text plus images, tested up to 8 images) in an open-weight model
- Largest nominal context of any open-weight model at release: 10M tokens on Scout, 1M on Maverick
- Scout fits on a single H100 GPU with Int4 quantization; pretrained on 200 languages
- High throughput: 17B active params reach 500+ tokens/s on fast providers (Groq lists Scout at 594 TPS)
- Benchmark trust damaged: Meta submitted an unreleased chat-optimized Maverick variant to LMArena (ELO 1417), which devs called misleading since public weights score lower
- Long-context claims collapse in practice: Scout scored ~15.6% at 128K on Fiction.LiveBench vs 90.6% for Gemini 2.5 Pro, and hosted providers cap Scout far below 10M (e.g. ~320K on DeepInfra)
- Coding widely panned on r/LocalLlama and HN, losing to the similarly-priced DeepSeek V3 on real dev tasks
- Not OSI open source: license excludes EU-domiciled companies, requires a special license above 700M MAU, and mandates Llama branding
- 109B/400B total params are too big for consumer GPUs, and the lineage stalled: no reasoning variant shipped and Behemoth was never released
Claude Sonnet 5
- Large agentic gains over Sonnet 4.6: Terminal-Bench 2.1 80.4% vs 67.0%, OSWorld-Verified 81.2% vs 78.5%, SWE-bench Pro 63.2% vs 58.1%
- Matches Opus 4.8 on knowledge work (GDPval-AA v2: 1,618 vs 1,615) and nearly ties it on Humanity's Last Exam with tools (57.4% vs 57.9%) at 60% of Opus 4.8 pricing (40% during the intro window)
- 1M token context window and 128K max output; introductory pricing of $2/$10 per 1M tokens through Aug 31, 2026
- Persistent self-verifying agent behavior: hands-on reviews note it tests its own code and iterates on hard problems until solved, unlike Sonnet 4.6
- First Sonnet with xhigh effort level and high-resolution vision (2576px images); adaptive thinking enabled by default
- Higher code-review precision than Sonnet 4.6 (38-40% vs 29%), producing fewer false-positive findings
- New tokenizer inflates token counts roughly 30% for the same text (1.0-1.35x per Anthropic; ~1.4x English, ~1.28x Python measured by Simon Willison), raising effective cost despite the unchanged sticker price
- Verbose and token-hungry: ~$2.29 per task vs ~$1.20 for Sonnet 4.6 in independent tests (ranked 101st of 161 for cost efficiency); at high effort cost-per-task can exceed Opus 4.8
- Measurably slower than Sonnet 4.6 on small routine edits and prone to over-engineering simple tasks (CodeRabbit hands-on review)
- Sampling parameters (temperature, top_p, top_k) removed; non-default values return a 400 error, breaking existing pipelines
- Launch sentiment on HN/Reddit was mixed: the '5' label was seen as overpromising, and stricter cybersecurity safeguards can refuse benign security-adjacent work
Cast your verdict
One recommendation per tool per gladiator. It reshapes the crowd score everyone sees.
The arena’s verdict on Llama 4 (Scout / Maverick)
Pick Llama 4 if you need a cheap, fast, self-hostable multimodal model for high-volume chat, extraction, or multilingual workloads outside the EU; Maverick lands near GPT-4o quality at roughly a tenth of the price. Avoid it for coding, hard reasoning, or genuine million-token retrieval, where DeepSeek, Qwen 3, and Gemini clearly outperform it. Versus Llama 3.3 70B it adds native vision and a longer window, but many developers found the older dense model or Qwen more reliable for pure text quality, and the 10M context is mostly a paper number.
The arena’s verdict on Claude Sonnet 5
Choose Sonnet 5 if you run coding, terminal or computer-use agents and want near Opus 4.8 quality at Sonnet prices, especially during the $2/$10 intro window; it is a strict upgrade over Sonnet 4.6 at low and medium effort. Budget for the new tokenizer and its verbosity: real per-task costs run well above Sonnet 4.6, and at the highest effort levels Opus 4.8 can be the better deal per solved task. Avoid it for latency-sensitive small edits or pipelines that rely on temperature and top_p, which now error. Sonnet 4.6 remains the pragmatic pick for high-volume tiny-diff workloads.
What the crowd says
On Llama 4 (Scout / Maverick)
No verdicts yet. Be the first to speak.
On Claude Sonnet 5
“Cheap per token, pricey per task. Independent tests had it near $2.29 a task vs $1.20 on 4.6, and at high effort it can out-cost Opus 4.8. It will not stop talking.”
“Terminal-Bench going 67 to 80 over Sonnet 4.6 matches what I see. My CI-fix agent went from constant babysitting to mostly hands-off overnight.”
“Matches Opus 4.8 on knowledge work at 60% of the price, and the intro $2/$10 window makes it silly value. My research agent runs on Sonnet 5 now, zero regrets.”
Keep comparing
Frequently asked questions
Is Llama 4 (Scout / Maverick) better than Claude Sonnet 5?
The crowd currently sides with Claude Sonnet 5: 57% recommend it, versus 50% for Llama 4 (Scout / Maverick) (3 votes). On Reasoning, Claude Sonnet 5 rates higher (4.5/5 vs 2.5/5). The right pick depends on your use case. The line-by-line comparison on this page breaks down pricing, key specs and arena ratings.
Which is cheaper, Llama 4 (Scout / Maverick) or Claude Sonnet 5?
Llama 4 (Scout / Maverick) is cheaper: it starts at $0.60/1M out (Maverick, hosted), while Claude Sonnet 5 starts at $15/1M out ($10 intro until 2026-08-31).
How much do Llama 4 (Scout / Maverick) and Claude Sonnet 5 cost per 1M tokens?
Llama 4 (Scout / Maverick): $0.15/1M in (Maverick, hosted) per 1M input tokens, $0.60/1M out (Maverick, hosted) per 1M output tokens. Claude Sonnet 5: $3/1M in ($2 intro until 2026-08-31) per 1M input tokens, $15/1M out ($10 intro until 2026-08-31) per 1M output tokens.