Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Kimi K3
Anthropic's Claude Haiku 4.5 and Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 both target production language workloads, but they price and behave differently. Here is the side-by-side.
Pricing checked against provider documentation on . How we verify
The short answer
Claude Haiku 4.5 is the cheaper option — roughly 3.0x less on a blended workload, and it suits lowest-latency claude responses. Kimi K3 justifies its premium when you need natively multimodal long-horizon agents.
Anthropic • Claude 4.5
$1.00 / $5.00
/ 1M tokens (input / output)
The fastest model Anthropic ships, still on the Claude 4.5 generation with a 200K window and an early-2025 knowledge cutoff. Worth it when response latency is the product requirement; otherwise Sonnet 5 offers more capability and five times the context for twice the price.
Moonshot AI • Kimi K
$3.00 / $15.00
/ 1M tokens (input / output)
At 2.8T total parameters with 104B active, Kimi K3 is the largest open-weight model in general circulation and the only one here that ingests video natively. Reasoning is always on with configurable effort. The licence is the catch: it is not a standard open licence, and organisations above $20M in revenue need a separate commercial agreement.
Input price
Kimi K3 is 3.0x the price than Claude Haiku 4.5 on input tokens.
Output price
Kimi K3 is 3.0x the price than Claude Haiku 4.5 on output tokens — usually the side that dominates the bill.
Monthly cost at three workload sizes
Standard (non-batch, non-cached) rates. Reasoning models will exceed these figures because thinking tokens bill as output.
| Workload | Claude Haiku 4.5 | Kimi K3 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light — 1M in / 200K out | $2 | $6 | $4 |
| Moderate — 10M in / 2M out | $20 | $60 | $40 |
| Heavy — 100M in / 20M out | $200 | $600 | $400 |
Specification comparison
| Attribute | Claude Haiku 4.5 | Kimi K3 |
|---|---|---|
| Input (/ 1M tokens) | $1.00 | $3.00 |
| Output (/ 1M tokens) | $5.00 | $15.00 |
| Cached input | $0.10 | $0.30 |
| Context window | 200,000 tokens | 1,048,576 tokens |
| Max output | 64,000 tokens | 131,072 tokens |
| Native reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Knowledge cutoff | 2025-02 | 2026-02 |
| Relative latency | low | high |
| Open weights | No | Kimi K3 License (commercial terms above $20M revenue) |
| API model ID | claude-haiku-4-5 | kimi-k3 |
| Status | stable | stable |
Kimi K3: The custom licence requires a separate commercial agreement once the licensee and its affiliates exceed $20M revenue over any consecutive 12 months.
Choose Claude Haiku 4.5 if…
- Real-time chat suggestions
- Lightweight extraction and tagging
- Guardrail and routing calls
- High-frequency background jobs
Choose Kimi K3 if…
- Multimodal agent workflows
- Video and image understanding at length
- Ambitious long-horizon automation
- Research requiring open weights at scale
Frequently asked
Is Claude Haiku 4.5 or Kimi K3 cheaper?
Claude Haiku 4.5 is cheaper. On a blended 3:1 input-to-output workload it costs about 3.0x less than Kimi K3.
Which has the larger context window, Claude Haiku 4.5 or Kimi K3?
Kimi K3 has the larger window at 1.05M tokens versus 200K.
Should I use Claude Haiku 4.5 or Kimi K3?
Pick Claude Haiku 4.5 for lowest-latency claude responses. Pick Kimi K3 for natively multimodal long-horizon agents. If cost dominates the decision, Claude Haiku 4.5 wins; if you need the capability ceiling, benchmark both on your own evals before committing.