
Sonar Reasoning: Intelligence, Performance & Price Analysis
Analysis of Perplexity's Sonar Reasoning 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.
Comparison Summary
Intelligence:
Sonar Reasoning is of higher quality compared to average, with Intelligence Index across evaluations of 49.
Price:Sonar Reasoning is cheaper compared to average with a price of $2.00 per 1M Tokens (blended 3:1).
Sonar Reasoning Input token price: $1.00, Output token price: $5.00 per 1M Tokens.
Speed:Sonar Reasoning Input token price: $1.00, Output token price: $5.00 per 1M Tokens.
Sonar Reasoning is slower compared to average, with a output speed of 80.1 tokens per second.
Latency:Sonar Reasoning has a lower latency compared to average, taking 1.48s to receive the first token (TTFT).
Context Window:Sonar Reasoning has a smaller context windows than average, with a context window of 130k 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:
Sonar Reasoning Model Details
Comparisons to Sonar Reasoning
Sonar Reasoning
GPT-4.1
o4-mini (high)
o3
o3-pro
Llama 4 Scout
Llama 4 Maverick
Gemini 2.5 Pro
Gemini 2.5 Flash (Reasoning)
Claude 4 Opus Thinking
Claude 4 Sonnet Thinking
Magistral Small
DeepSeek V3 0324 (Mar '25)
DeepSeek R1 0528 (May '25)
Grok 3 mini Reasoning (high)
Grok 4
Nova Premier
MiniMax M1 80k
Kimi k2
Qwen3 235B (Reasoning)
GPT-4o (Nov '24)
Further details