Video · Nate Herk ·

I Tested Sonnet 5.5 vs Opus 5.5. What You Need to Know.

In a video by Nate Herk, Claude Sonnet 5.5 is tested against Opus 5.5 across seven real workflows (landing pages, messy data turned into spreadsheets, motion design/video editing, live dashboards, project planning) to determine when to use each model. Sonnet 5.5 is described as a clear upgrade over Sonnet 5, running 30% faster and costing 30% less for most work. Pricing: Sonnet 5.5 costs $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, while Opus 5.5 costs $4 and $20 respectively—roughly double. Drawing on Claude's own guidance, Sonnet suits well-scoped, high-volume, clearly-specified tasks with a way to verify results (everyday coding, bug fixes, polished documents, slides, spreadsheets), whereas Opus suits complex work requiring judgment, creativity, and the most intelligence. In a landing-page demo for 'Perk Form' using identical prompts with both on high effort, Opus produced the better overall output by using real generated product images within brand guidelines, though Sonnet's hero section was stronger. Sonnet ran 28 minutes with 20M input/134K output tokens; Opus ran 52 minutes with 37M input/148K output tokens, costing about double.

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