Claude Opus 4.6 vs Grok 4.20 beta 0309 Reasoning

Claude Opus 4.6 vs Grok 4.20 beta 0309 Reasoning: Grok 4.20 beta 0309 Reasoning is cheaper by 76% on average. Claude Opus 4.6 from Azure AI Foundry (200,000-token context, reasoning, tool calls) vs. Grok 4.20 beta 0309 Reasoning from xAI (2,000,000-token context, reasoning, tool calls). Use Agent Command Center to A/B both in shadow mode and pick the winner per workload.

Side-by-side cost

Live workload comparison

Same workload run through both models. The cheaper one is highlighted.

Input tokens / request3,000

02,000,000

Output tokens / request400

0200,000

Requests / day5,000

01,000,000

Claude Opus 4.6

Azure AI Foundry

$3,805/mo

Input $5.00/M · Output $25.00/M

Grok 4.20 beta 0309 ReasoningCheaper

xAI

$1,278/mo

Input $2.00/M · Output $6.00/M

At this workload, Grok 4.20 beta 0309 Reasoning is 66% cheaper than Claude Opus 4.6 — a savings of $2,526/month ($30,316/year).

Production recipe — Agent Command Center

strategy: cost-optimized
primary:
  model: grok-4-20-beta-0309-reasoning
  provider: xai
fallback:
  model: claude-opus-4-6
  provider: azure-ai-foundry
shadow: { sample_rate: 0.05 }   # mirror 5% of traffic to compare quality live

Get started free →Routing docs ↗

	Claude Opus 4.6 Azure AI Foundry	Grok 4.20 beta 0309 Reasoning xAI
Input price	$5.00/M	$2.00/M
Output price	$25.00/M	$6.00/M
Context window	200,000	2,000,000
Max output	128,000	2,000,000
Function calling	✓	✓
Vision	✓	✓
Audio input	—	—
Reasoning	✓	✓
Prompt caching	✓	✓
Structured output	✓	—
Pricing verified	May 12, 2026	May 12, 2026