Llama 4 Maverick vs Claude Opus 4.6
Comprehensive comparison between Meta's Llama 4 Maverick and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6. Compare pricing, performance, features, and user reviews.
Llama 4 Maverick
MetaMeta's flagship open-source multimodal model. 17B active parameters with 400B total (128 expert MoE). 1M context window, natively multimodal with early fusion. Extremely cost-effective at $0.15/$0.60 per M tokens. Supports 12 languages.
Claude Opus 4.6
AnthropicAnthropic's flagship model with 1M token context (now default), adaptive thinking, and the highest agentic coding scores. Introduced Agent Teams for parallel autonomous coding. Nearly doubled ARC-AGI-2 score over Opus 4.5 (68.8% vs 37.6%).
Specs Comparison
| Specification | Llama 4 Maverick | Claude Opus 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| Context Window | 1049K | 1000K |
| Max Output | 16K | 128K |
| Input (per 1M tokens) | $0.15 | $5.00 |
| Output (per 1M tokens) | $0.60 | $25.00 |
| Reasoning | ||
| Open Source |
Scenario Score Comparison
Llama 4 Maverick
Pros
- + Extremely affordable ($0.15/$0.60)
- + 1M context window
- + Native multimodal (text + image)
- + Open source (Llama 4 Community License)
- + High throughput MoE architecture
Cons
- − Coding performance below Claude/GPT
- − Benchmark gaming controversy
- − 16K max output limit
- − Knowledge cutoff August 2024
Claude Opus 4.6
Pros
- + Highest SWE-bench score (80.8%)
- + 128K max output (doubled from 4.5)
- + Adaptive thinking with effort levels
- + Agent Teams for parallel coding
- + Best instruction following in complex contexts
Cons
- − 2x price of GPT-5.4
- − Response prefilling removed (breaking change)
- − Extended thinking deprecated
- − Rate limits can be hit quickly on entry-level plans
Recommendation
Choose Llama 4 Maverick if you:
- • Need extremely affordable ($0.15/$0.60)
- • Need 1m context window
- • Need native multimodal (text + image)
Choose Claude Opus 4.6 if you:
- • Need highest swe-bench score (80.8%)
- • Need 128k max output (doubled from 4.5)
- • Need adaptive thinking with effort levels
Based on scores across 2 scenarios, Claude Opus 4.6 performs better overall.
Get Started with Llama 4 Maverick
💡 Open source - can be self-hosted or used via API providers.
Get Started with Claude Opus 4.6
💡 Free tier uses Sonnet. Upgrade to Pro for Opus.
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