Monthly cost at list price for five common workloads. Token counts per unit are stated so you can scale them to your own traffic. A workload that does not fit a model's context window is marked rather than priced.
Workload (per month)
Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5
Pareto 26.10
Difference
Customer-support chatbot
50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens)
$700
$124
Pareto 26.10 saves $576
RAG search over documents
20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens)
$680
$128
Pareto 26.10 saves $552
Coding / tool-using agent
2,000 tasks — each a multi-step task with tool calls and file context (60,000 in / 6,000 out tokens)
$720
$134
Pareto 26.10 saves $586
Batch summarisation
10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens)
$440
$83.20
Pareto 26.10 saves $357
Long-document analysis
500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens)
$220
$43.20
Pareto 26.10 saves $177
Capabilities side by side
Capability
Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5
Pareto 26.10
What it lets you do
Tool / function calling
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
call your APIs and run agent loops
Structured output (JSON schema)
✓ Yes
—
return JSON that validates against your schema
Reasoning / thinking mode
✓ Yes
—
spend extra tokens thinking before answering hard problems
Image input
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
read screenshots, charts and scanned pages
Audio input
—
—
take speech or audio directly
File / PDF input
✓ Yes
—
accept documents without your own parsing step
Image output
—
—
generate images, not just text
Built-in web search
✓ Yes
—
answer from live web results
Seed (reproducible sampling)
—
—
repeat a generation for tests and evals
Log-probabilities
—
—
read token confidence for classification and scoring
From each model's published parameters and input/output types. “—” means not advertised, not proven absent.
Price history
Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5: price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-09-23.
Pareto 26.10: price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-10-18.
Which should you choose?
Choose Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 if…
you need structured output (JSON schema) — to return JSON that validates against your schema; Pareto 26.10 does not advertise it
you need reasoning / thinking mode — to spend extra tokens thinking before answering hard problems; Pareto 26.10 does not advertise it
you need file / PDF input — to accept documents without your own parsing step; Pareto 26.10 does not advertise it
you need built-in web search — to answer from live web results; Pareto 26.10 does not advertise it
Choose Pareto 26.10 if…
cost matters at scale — it is 83% cheaper on a typical 3:1 input/output mix ($124 vs $700 a month for 50,000 support chats)
Frequently asked questions
Is Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 better than Pareto 26.10?
Neither wins outright: Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 is the pick when you need structured output (JSON schema), Pareto 26.10 when cost matters at scale. In short: Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 when you need structured output (JSON schema), you need reasoning / thinking mode, you need file / PDF input, you need built-in web search; Pareto 26.10 when cost matters at scale.
Which is cheaper, Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 or Pareto 26.10?
Pareto 26.10 is cheaper: $1.40 vs $8.00 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 83% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $124 against $700.
How much do Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 and Pareto 26.10 cost per million tokens?
Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 costs $4.00 per 1M input tokens and $20.00 per 1M output tokens; Pareto 26.10 costs $0.80 input and $3.20 output. Output tokens are billed separately, so long answers shift the gap.
Which has the bigger context window, Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 or Pareto 26.10?
Pareto 26.10: 1.0M tokens, about 1,573 pages, against 1M (about 1,500 pages) for Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5.
Do Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 and Pareto 26.10 support function calling and JSON output?
Tool calling — Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5: yes, Pareto 26.10: yes. JSON-schema structured output — Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5: yes, Pareto 26.10: not advertised.
Can Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 or Pareto 26.10 read images?
Yes, both accept image input.
Is Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 or Pareto 26.10 free to use?
No free variant is listed for either; both are pay-per-token.
What is the maximum output length of Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 and Pareto 26.10?
Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 can write up to 128K tokens (about 96,000 words) per response; Pareto 26.10 up to 131K (about 98,300 words).
When were Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 and Pareto 26.10 released?
Anthropic: Claude Opus 5.5 was listed on 2026-09-22; Pareto 26.10 on 2026-10-15.
Claude Opus 5.5 is Anthropic's flagship model for demanding reasoning, coding, and long-horizon agentic work, succeeding Claude Opus 5. It is particularly strong at multi-step changes in large codebases, code...
Pareto is a multimodal composite model built for research, coding, and agentic workflows, while delivering frontier-level performance across a broad range of general-purpose tasks.