Claude Sonnet 5 vs Nova Lite 1.0 compared — price per token, context window, multimodality, openness and which to choose. Full 2026 breakdown.
Claude Sonnet 5 — full profile › · Nova Lite 1.0 — full profile ›
Prices & specs refreshed from live data · olud.ai
Open-model prices = cheapest provider via OpenRouter; official maker rates may be higher.
| Spec | Claude Sonnet 5 | Nova Lite 1.0 | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maker | Anthropic | Amazon | – |
| Type | Proprietary | Proprietary | – |
| Context window | 1M tokens | 300K tokens | |
| Input price | $2/M | $0.06/M | AMNova Lite 1.0 |
| Output price | $10/M | $0.24/M | AMNova Lite 1.0 |
| Vision / multimodal | Yes | Yes | = Tie |
| Tool / function calling | Yes | Yes | = Tie |
| Self-hostable | No (API only) | No (API only) | – |
| License | Proprietary | Proprietary | – |
Nova Lite 1.0 is ~42× cheaper than Claude Sonnet 5 on output tokens ($0.24 vs $10 per M tokens).
| Capability | Claude Sonnet 5 | Nova Lite 1.0 |
|---|---|---|
| Open weights (downloadable) | ✗ | ✗ |
| Self-hostable | ✗ | ✗ |
| Runs fully offline | ✗ | ✗ |
| Vision / multimodal | ✓ | ✓ |
| Tool / function calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| 1M+ context window | ✓ | ✗ |
Independent benchmark scores measured by Artificial Analysis. Higher is better (except latency).
Benchmark data by Artificial Analysis.
| Criterion | Claude Sonnet 5 | Nova Lite 1.0 |
|---|---|---|
| Cost-efficiency | 3.5 | 5.0 |
| Context window | 5.0 | 4.0 |
| Openness | 1.5 | 1.5 |
| Self-hosting | 1.0 | 1.0 |
| Multimodality | 5.0 | 5.0 |
Scores come from live data — output price (cost), context length, open vs closed weights (openness & self-hosting) and vision/tool support (multimodality). Raw task quality isn't scored here; it depends on your benchmark — see the verdict.
Sonnet 5 is Anthropic's most capable Sonnet-class model, with frontier performance across coding, agents, and professional work. It supports adaptive thinking with selectable reasoning effort levels (low, medium, high, max,...
Amazon Nova Lite 1.0 is a very low-cost multimodal model from Amazon that focused on fast processing of image, video, and text inputs to generate text output. Amazon Nova Lite...
These variants are tracked but not compared here — one page per family keeps the comparison readable.
Nova Lite 1.0 is cheaper on output ($0.24/M vs $10/M).
Claude Sonnet 5 offers the larger context window (1M tokens).
Choose Nova Lite 1.0 for the lower output price ($0.24/M vs $10/M). Choose Claude Sonnet 5 if you need the larger 1M context window.
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