Anthropic vs OpenRouter
Same workloads, both price lists, refreshed daily. List prices tie on all 15 shared line items today, so the choice comes down to platform differences (routing, limits, tooling), summarized below.
Anthropic
Claude models via first-party API. Strong at coding, agents and long-context work.
- Frontier coding/agent models
- 200K+ context
- Prompt caching up to 90% off inputs
OpenRouter
One API key for 340+ models across every major provider, with automatic failover and pass-through pricing. The fastest way to hedge provider risk or A/B models without new integrations.
- 340+ models, one integration
- Automatic provider failover
- Pass-through pricing, small platform fee
Shared models, priced by both
List prices refreshed 2026-08-23 ยท input $/1M tokens| Model | Anthropic in/out | OpenRouter in/out | Cheaper input |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude 3 Haiku | $0.250 / $1.25 | $0.250 / $1.25 | tie |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $1.00 / $5.00 | $1.00 / $5.00 | tie |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | $2.00 / $10.00 | $2.00 / $10.00 | tie |
| Claude-3.7-Sonnet | $3.00 / $15.00 | $3.00 / $15.00 | tie |
| Claude Sonnet 4 | $3.00 / $15.00 | $3.00 / $15.00 | tie |
| Claude Sonnet 4.5 | $3.00 / $15.00 | $3.00 / $15.00 | tie |
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | $3.00 / $15.00 | $3.00 / $15.00 | tie |
| Claude Opus 4.5 | $5.00 / $25.00 | $5.00 / $25.00 | tie |
| Claude Opus 4.6 | $5.00 / $25.00 | $5.00 / $25.00 | tie |
| Claude Opus 4.7 | $5.00 / $25.00 | $5.00 / $25.00 | tie |
| Claude Opus 5 | $5.00 / $25.00 | $5.00 / $25.00 | tie |
| Claude Opus 4.8 | $5.00 / $25.00 | $5.00 / $25.00 | tie |
| Claude Fable 5 | $10.00 / $50.00 | $10.00 / $50.00 | tie |
| Claude Opus 4 | $15.00 / $75.00 | $15.00 / $75.00 | tie |
| Claude Opus 4.1 | $15.00 / $75.00 | $15.00 / $75.00 | tie |
Cheaper-on-count is a tally of listed prices, not a quality verdict: throughput, reliability and quantization differ between providers. Disclosure.