Grok vs Claude: Which AI Is Actually Better in 2026?

The short version of Grok vs Claude: Claude is the stronger general model and Grok is the cheaper one to run. On Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index v4.3, Claude Opus 5 scores 50.7 and Grok 4.6 scores 44.4. Through the API, Grok 4.6 costs $2 in and $6 out per million tokens against Claude Opus 5's $5 and $25. Claude wins on capability. Grok wins on cost, on live access to X, and on answering things Claude will not. SpaceXAI has since shipped a newer model at the same token price, and the Grok 4.7 benchmarks move this comparison by two index points.

That sounds simple, and it is the part almost every comparison gets wrong. These two companies publish benchmark scores at different reasoning-effort settings, on different splits of the same test, and on index versions that have since been rescaled. In one case they publish flatly different numbers for the same model on the same benchmark. This article shows where the figures come from, says plainly when two of them cannot be compared, and covers the thing none of the others mention: what happens when you try to use either one on a Mac.

The Key Takeaways

• Capability: Claude Opus 5 scores 50.7 on Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index v4.3 against Grok 4.6's 44.4. Claude Fable 5.1 sits above both at 53.4.
• Coding: on DeepSWE v1.1, Grok 4.6 scores 65.9% at high effort and 67.0% at xhigh. Anthropic reports Claude Opus 5 at 68.8%, but xAI's own card puts Opus 5 at 74.0%. The two vendors disagree about Claude.
• Like-for-like: on FrontierCode 1.1 Extended, where both companies report the same split, it is Opus 5 at 63.6% against Grok 4.6 at 61.3%.
• API cost: Grok 4.6 runs $2 in and $6 out per million tokens. Claude Opus 5 runs $5 in and $25 out. Grok is roughly four times cheaper on output.
• Mac: Claude ships a native macOS chat app. The only Mac app xAI ships is Grok Bot, an agent product in beta on paid tiers, so ordinary Grok chat is still a browser tab.

Grok vs Claude at a Glance

Every figure in that table comes from xAI's or Anthropic's own published material, and the sources are named in the sections below. Where a cell says not published, that is a real gap in the vendor's documentation, not a number we could not find.

The Benchmarks Both Sides Actually Publish

This is the part that makes an honest comparison hard. xAI reports one set of benchmarks for Grok 4.6 and Anthropic reports a mostly different set for Claude Opus 5, and where they do overlap they often report different effort settings or different splits.

The one clean like-for-like number

FrontierCode 1.1 is an agentic coding benchmark of 150 tasks built by Cognition from real pull requests in open-source repositories, and it is scored by Cognition rather than by either vendor. On its Extended set, Anthropic reports Claude Opus 5 at 63.6% and xAI reports Grok 4.6 at 61.3%. Better still, xAI's own model card puts Opus 5 at that same 63.6% in the same chart as its own model, so the two companies independently agree on the comparison. Claude wins it by a little over two points.

That is the single most trustworthy number in this article: same benchmark, same split, third-party scorer, and both vendors reporting the same value for the rival. You can read xAI's full list on its Grok 4.6 announcement and Anthropic's in the Claude Opus 5 system card.

Where the two vendors flatly disagree

DeepSWE v1.1 is a set of 113 long-horizon software engineering tasks written from scratch to avoid contamination. Grok 4.6 scores 65.9% at high effort and 67.0% at xhigh. For Claude Opus 5, Anthropic's system card reports 68.8%, while xAI's model card reports 74.0% for the same model at max effort, citing the benchmark operator's own run.

Those are not rounding differences, and the ranking changes depending on which you believe: at 68.8 Opus 5 sits behind two other frontier models on that board, and at 74.0 it leads it. When the two companies disagree about the rival's score by five points, the honest thing is to report both and lean on FrontierCode instead.

What only one side publishes

Claude reports SWE-bench Verified at 96.0%, along with SWE-bench Pro at 79.2%, Multilingual at 89.5% and Multimodal at 59.4%. xAI publishes no SWE-bench Verified figure for Grok 4.6. It has published SWE-bench numbers for other models, so this is a gap for this model rather than a company policy, but it matters because SWE-bench Verified is the number most people mean when they ask which model is better at code.

Grok, meanwhile, reports numbers Claude does not: CursorBench v3.2 at 69.9%, APEX-Agents at 57.5%, APEX-SWE at 56.4% and Terminal-Bench v3.0 at 26%. None of those has a published Claude Opus 5 counterpart on the same version, so none of them can settle anything between the two.

A note on how Claude's numbers were produced

Anthropic states its configuration openly, which is more than most vendors do. Unless the system card notes otherwise, Opus 5 results use adaptive thinking at maximum effort, default sampling settings, and are averaged over five trials, with context windows that never exceed one million tokens. FrontierCode is an explicit exception: Opus 5 reaches its best score there at medium effort, and Anthropic reports that performance actually declines above high effort because the model starts making more changes than the task asked for. Benchmarks measure a configuration, not a personality, which is the theme of our guide to what AI benchmarks actually measure.

Grok vs Claude on Coding

Coding is the single most searched angle on this comparison, so it deserves a direct answer: on the published evidence Claude is ahead, but by a little over two points, not the landslide either side's headline numbers suggest.

The honest scoreboard

Use FrontierCode 1.1 Extended, because it is the only place where both companies report the same split and agree on each other's score: Opus 5 at 63.6%, Grok 4.6 at 61.3%. On a 150-task agentic coding benchmark scored by an independent third party, that is a narrow Claude win.

Treat every other coding comparison you see with suspicion, including on DeepSWE, where the two vendors disagree about Claude by five points. And watch the effort settings: Grok's 65.9% is a high-effort run and its own best is 67.0% at xhigh, while Anthropic runs Opus 5 at max. Putting 68.8 next to 65.9 quietly compares two different configurations.

Claude's 96.0% on SWE-bench Verified is a much more impressive headline, and it is genuine, but it cannot be used to beat Grok because xAI published no Grok 4.6 score on it. An absent number is not a zero.

Where the difference shows up in practice

The benchmarks point the same way that daily use does. Claude's advantage grows with the size of the job: long files, multi-step refactors, work that has to stay coherent across a long session. Grok's advantage is cost and speed, which matters when you are making many small calls rather than a few large ones.

If you are choosing between subscriptions rather than APIs, note that coding-specific tooling is a separate purchase on both sides. Claude's developer tooling has its own pricing, covered in our guide to what Claude's coding plans cost, and Grok 4.6 ships inside third-party editors whose own costs are covered in our Cursor pricing breakdown. Neither chat subscription is a complete coding setup on its own.

Why Every Comparison You Read Disagrees

Search this topic and you will find articles confidently stating that Grok and Claude are tied, that Claude leads by two points, or that Grok leads on coding. They are not all lying. They are quoting different things and not saying so.

Benchmark versions get rescaled

xAI's own Grok 4.6 announcement lists an Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index score of 61. Artificial Analysis's live figure for the same model today is 44.4. Both are accurate as published. The index was rescaled between those two moments, and a score only means something next to its version number. On the current v4.3 index the order runs Claude Fable 5.1 at 53.4, GPT-6 Astra at 52.8, Claude Opus 5 at 50.7 and Grok 4.6 at 44.4, so Opus 5 is third rather than second. You can check the live figures on the Artificial Analysis model page for Grok 4.6, and we track the wider ranking on our best AI models page.

Benchmarks have more than one split

FrontierCode 1.1 has a Main set and an Extended set, and they produce very different numbers. Anthropic reports Opus 5 at 53.4% on Main and 63.6% on Extended. If you took the Main figure for one model and the Extended figure for the other, you would show Grok's 61.3% comfortably beating Claude's 53.4%, when the matched comparison actually has Claude ahead. Nothing in either number is false; the pairing is what breaks.

Effort settings are rarely stated

Both models can be run at several reasoning-effort levels, and the scores move a lot between them. Grok 4.6 goes from 65.9% to 67.0% on DeepSWE between high and xhigh. Opus 5 moves the other way on FrontierCode, peaking at medium and falling above high effort. A comparison that does not name the effort level for both sides is not a comparison.

The practical lesson is the one we apply across every comparison on this site: a benchmark number without a version, a split and a configuration is decoration, not evidence.

Grok vs Claude on Price

Pricing is where the two diverge most sharply, and the answer flips depending on whether you are buying a subscription or paying per token.

Subscriptions

Anthropic publishes its consumer prices plainly: Free at $0, Pro at $17 a month on an annual plan or $20 billed monthly, and Max from $100 a month with either five times or twenty times Pro's usage.

xAI is harder to pin down. Its paid tiers are named in its own announcements as SuperGrok, SuperGrok Plus and SuperGrok Heavy, but the prices are not on a page you can read without signing in, and the figures circulating in comparison articles are not traceable to an xAI source. We deliberately do not quote a SuperGrok price here for that reason. For current figures on either side, we maintain a full breakdown of Grok's plans and the same for Claude, and the free tiers are covered in our guide to what Grok gives away.

Per token

The API is where both sides publish, and it is where the ordering reverses hard. Grok 4.6 costs $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output. Claude Opus 5 costs $5 in and $25 out. On output, which is where most real spending happens, Claude is roughly four times the price. Both companies also sell a faster variant at twice their standard rate, so that is not a difference between them.

That gap is the strongest argument for Grok in this whole comparison. If your work is high volume and quality-tolerant, Grok is a genuinely better deal, and the three-point benchmark difference will not justify a four-fold cost difference. If your work is low volume and quality-critical, the cost gap is noise. For a broader view across vendors, see our AI pricing comparison.

Grok vs Claude on Your Mac

This is the difference nobody else writing about Grok and Claude seems to mention, and for Mac owners it is often the one that decides the question.

Claude has a chat app, Grok has an agent app

Anthropic ships a native macOS app for Claude chat. You install it, it sits in your Dock, it has a global keyboard shortcut and a menu-bar icon, and it behaves like software rather than a website.

xAI does ship a Mac download, and this is where most comparisons get it wrong in one direction or the other. The macOS app xAI offers is Grok Bot, its agent product, announced in August 2026 and still in beta. It is available to SuperGrok, SuperGrok Plus and SuperGrok Heavy subscribers as well as several Cursor tiers, and it comes with its own usage allowance separate from ordinary Grok. There is no Mac app for plain Grok chat, so day-to-day Grok on a Mac still means grok.com in a browser tab, the X app, or a third-party wrapper.

That distinction matters because the two are not substitutes. An agent that signs into your tools and works on its own is not what you want when you simply need to ask a question, and a browser tab gets buried, loses focus and reloads. We cover the workarounds in detail in our guide to running Grok on a Mac.

What about the agent products

Both companies now sell something beyond chat, and Grok Bot has a direct Anthropic counterpart. These are separate products with separate pricing from the chat subscriptions discussed here, and we compare them in Grok Bot vs Claude Cowork. Do not assume your chat plan includes either one.

Running both without paying twice

The honest conclusion of this comparison is that Grok and Claude are good at different things, which is an awkward answer if it means two subscriptions. A multi-model Mac client like Fello AI is one way around that: one native app, one keyboard shortcut, and several models behind it, so you can send the live-data question to one and the long reasoning job to another without switching tabs or maintaining two bills.

What Each One Refuses

Capability is only half of what separates these two. The other half is disposition, and it is a bigger practical difference than three benchmark points.

xAI positions Grok as unfiltered and willing to engage with political, edgy and unconventional questions. Anthropic builds Claude to decline more, and to hedge more when it does answer. Which one is better depends entirely on what you are asking. For a journalist testing how a story is landing, Grok's willingness plus its live access to X is a real research tool that Claude cannot match, because Claude has no equivalent social data source. For a lawyer, a clinician or anyone drafting something that carries liability, Claude's caution is the product, not an obstacle.

This is also the axis most likely to change without warning. Content policies get tightened and loosened far more often than model weights get updated, so treat any specific claim about what either one will answer today, including ours, as a snapshot rather than a specification.

Which Should You Choose?

Choose Claude if you want the better all-round model, you work with long documents or long codebases, you write for a living, or you want a real Mac chat app. It leads the Intelligence Index v4.3 by six points and wins the one coding benchmark both companies score the same way, and its pricing is at least published where you can read it.

Choose Grok if you need live access to what is being said on X right now, you want a model that argues back and refuses less, or you are building something on the API where paying $6 per million output tokens instead of $25 changes the economics of the whole project.

Choose both if you can, because the two are complementary rather than competing, and the sensible setup is one interface with both behind it. If you are still weighing the wider field, our Grok against ChatGPT and Claude against ChatGPT comparisons cover the third obvious option, and our guide to picking a model per task covers the rest.

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