Claude 2.1: Intelligence, Performance & Price Analysis
Analysis of Anthropic's Claude 2.1 and comparison to other AI models across key metrics including quality, price, performance (tokens per second & time to first token), context window & more. Click on any model to compare API providers for that model. For more details including relating to our methodology, see our FAQs.
Anthropic has launched a newer model, Claude 3 Sonnet. We suggest considering this model instead of Claude 2.1. See the following pages for a comparison of Claude 3 Sonnet to other models and Claude 3 Sonnet API provider benchmarks.
Comparison Summary
Intelligence:
Claude 2.1 is of lower intelligence compared to average, with Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index of 10.
Price:Claude 2.1 is more expensive compared to average with a price of $12.00 per 1M Tokens (blended 3:1).
Claude 2.1 Input token price: $8.00, Output token price: $24.00 per 1M Tokens.
Speed:Latency:Context Window:Claude 2.1 Input token price: $8.00, Output token price: $24.00 per 1M Tokens.
Claude 2.1 has a smaller context windows than average, with a context window of 200k tokens.
Highlights
Intelligence
Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index; Higher is better
Estimate (independent evaluation forthcoming)
Speed
Output Tokens per Second; Higher is better
Price
USD per 1M Tokens; Lower is better
Parallel Queries:
Prompt Length:
Claude 2.1 Model Details
Comparisons to Claude 2.1
Claude 2.1
GPT-5 (high)
GPT-4.1
gpt-oss-120B (high)
gpt-oss-20B (high)
o3
GPT-5 (minimal)
Llama 4 Maverick
Gemini 2.5 Pro
Gemini 2.5 Flash (Reasoning)
Claude 4 Sonnet Thinking
Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking
Magistral Small
DeepSeek V3.1 (Reasoning)
DeepSeek V3.1 (Non-reasoning)
DeepSeek R1 0528
Grok Code Fast 1
Grok 4
Solar Pro 2 (Reasoning)
Llama Nemotron Super 49B v1.5 (Reasoning)
Kimi K2
EXAONE 4.0 32B (Reasoning)
GLM-4.5
Qwen3 235B 2507 (Reasoning)
Further details