Compare · updated 2026-11-01

Claude Opus vs GPT-5.5

Claude Opus is better at writing, coding, reasoning, maths, translation; GPT-5.5 is better at quick answers, structured data, long documents. Claude Opus is the cheaper of the two on output.

Measured quality by task

Quality is Nivana’s measured score for each kind of task, from weekly pairwise evals judged by models from several labs. Prices are live AI Gateway list prices per million tokens. Updated 2026-11-01. How this is measured.

Price and context

Which should you use?

Use the one that wins the kind of work you do most, unless the price gap outweighs the quality gap for easy requests. Or don’t choose: Nivana scores both, and the rest of the pool, on every request and sends it to whichever is best for that request.

Questions

Is Claude Opus better than GPT-5.5?

On Nivana’s weekly evals Claude Opus scores higher on 5 of 8 task types (writing, coding, reasoning, maths, translation) and GPT-5.5 on 3 (quick answers, structured data, long documents). Neither is better at everything.

Which is better for coding, Claude Opus or GPT-5.5?

Claude Opus: 98/100 against 91/100 for GPT-5.5 on Nivana’s coding evals.

Which is better for writing, Claude Opus or GPT-5.5?

Claude Opus: 94/100 against 94/100 for GPT-5.5 on Nivana’s writing evals.

Which is cheaper, Claude Opus or GPT-5.5?

Claude Opus: $20 per million output tokens against $30 for GPT-5.5, about 1.5× less. A typical chat answer costs about $0.020 on Claude Opus and $0.029 on GPT-5.5.