Sonar Pro Search vs Nova Lite 1.0 compared — price per token, context window, multimodality, openness and which to choose. Full 2026 breakdown.
Sonar Pro Search — 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 | Sonar Pro Search | Nova Lite 1.0 | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maker | Perplexity | Amazon | – |
| Type | Proprietary | Proprietary | – |
| Context window | 200K tokens | 300K tokens | AMNova Lite 1.0 |
| Input price | $3/M | $0.06/M | AMNova Lite 1.0 |
| Output price | $15/M | $0.24/M | AMNova Lite 1.0 |
| Vision / multimodal | Yes | Yes | = Tie |
| Tool / function calling | No | Yes | AMNova Lite 1.0 |
| Self-hostable | No (API only) | No (API only) | – |
| License | Proprietary | Proprietary | – |
Nova Lite 1.0 is ~63× cheaper than Sonar Pro Search on output tokens ($0.24 vs $15 per M tokens).
| Capability | Sonar Pro Search | Nova Lite 1.0 |
|---|---|---|
| Open weights (downloadable) | ✗ | ✗ |
| Self-hostable | ✗ | ✗ |
| Runs fully offline | ✗ | ✗ |
| Vision / multimodal | ✓ | ✓ |
| Tool / function calling | ✗ | ✓ |
| 1M+ context window | ✗ | ✗ |
| Criterion | Sonar Pro Search | Nova Lite 1.0 |
|---|---|---|
| Cost-efficiency | 3.0 | 5.0 |
| Context window | 4.0 | 4.0 |
| Openness | 1.5 | 1.5 |
| Self-hosting | 1.0 | 1.0 |
| Multimodality | 3.5 | 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.
Exclusively available on the OpenRouter API, Sonar Pro's new Pro Search mode is Perplexity's most advanced agentic search system. It is designed for deeper reasoning and analysis. Pricing is based...
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...
Nova Lite 1.0 is cheaper on output ($0.24/M vs $15/M).
Nova Lite 1.0 offers the larger context window (300K tokens).
Choose Nova Lite 1.0 for the lower output price ($0.24/M vs $15/M). It also gives you the larger 300K context window.
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