Claude 3.5 Haiku vs Phi-3.5 Medium
A complete head-to-head: pricing, context window, benchmarks, modality coverage, and openness, with a programmatic verdict synthesized from the underlying data.
- PriceClaude 3.5 Haiku
Claude 3.5 Haiku publishes pricing ($4.00 / 1M output tokens) while Phi-3.5 Medium does not.
- Context windowClaude 3.5 Haiku
Claude 3.5 Haiku accepts 200K tokens vs 128K, 1.6× the room for long documents and codebases.
- BenchmarksTie
No directly comparable public benchmarks are available for both models, check the spec sheets for individual scores.
- ModalitiesClaude 3.5 Haiku
Claude 3.5 Haiku supports 2 modalities (text, vision) vs 1 for Phi-3.5 Medium.
- OpennessPhi-3.5 Medium
Phi-3.5 Medium ships open weights (MIT); Claude 3.5 Haiku is API-only.
On balance Claude 3.5 Haiku edges ahead, winning 3 of 5 categories against Phi-3.5 Medium's 1. Claude 3.5 Haiku publishes pricing ($4.00 / 1M output tokens) while Phi-3.5 Medium does not. Claude 3.5 Haiku accepts 200K tokens vs 128K, 1.6× the room for long documents and codebases.
No directly comparable public benchmarks are available for both models, check the spec sheets for individual scores. They differ in modality coverage, Claude 3.5 Haiku handles text, vision while Phi-3.5 Medium handles text, which can be the deciding factor before you even look at benchmarks. Phi-3.5 Medium ships open weights (MIT); Claude 3.5 Haiku is API-only.
Claude 3.5 Haiku is the newer of the two, released 3 months after Phi-3.5 Medium, which usually means a more recent knowledge cutoff and updated safety post-training. Claude 3.5 Haiku is usually picked for customer support and code completion workloads, while Phi-3.5 Medium sees more deployments in on device and edge deployment. If pricing matters more than every last benchmark point, run the numbers in the calculator below before committing.
Side-by-side specs
| Spec | Claude 3.5 Haiku | Phi-3.5 Medium |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Microsoft |
| Released | Nov 2024 | Aug 2024 |
| Modalities | text, vision | text |
| Context window | 200K tokens | 128K tokens |
| Max output | , | , |
| Input · 1M | $0.80 / 1M tokens | Pricing not published |
| Output · 1M | $4.00 / 1M tokens | Pricing not published |
| Knowledge cutoff | , | , |
| Open weights | No | Yes (MIT) |
| API available | Yes | Yes |
Pricing at scale
What you'd actually pay at typical workloads. Numbers come from each model's published per-million-token rates.
- Light usage, 100k in / 50k out per day$8.40 vs ,
- Heavy usage, 1M in / 500k out per day$84.00 vs ,
- RAG workload, 5M in / 200k out per day$144 vs ,
Light usage, 100k in / 50k out per day: pricing not directly comparable (one or both models are missing public per-token rates). Heavy usage, 1M in / 500k out per day: pricing not directly comparable (one or both models are missing public per-token rates). RAG workload, 5M in / 200k out per day: pricing not directly comparable (one or both models are missing public per-token rates).
Estimated spend for the listed models at your usage. Numbers are derived from each model's published per-million-token rates.
- Claude 3.5 Haiku$0.280
- Phi-3.5 MediumPricing unavailable
Benchmarks compared
Only sourced numbers. Where a benchmark is missing for one model we show the available value rather than fabricating the other.
- MMLU,78.9
Claude 3.5 Haiku fits when…
- Fast
- Cheap for Anthropic
- Strong code at small size
- Long-context tasks, handles 200K tokens vs 128K for Phi-3.5 Medium.
- Multimodal needs covering vision.
Phi-3.5 Medium fits when…
- MIT license
- 128k context
- Strong reasoning at 14B
- Self-hosting and on-prem requirements, open weights (MIT).
Consider Claude Opus 4.7
Anthropic's mid-2026 flagship, ahead on SWE-bench, agent reliability, and writing quality.
Frequently asked
Is Claude 3.5 Haiku or Phi-3.5 Medium cheaper?
Per-token pricing isn't published for at least one of these models, check each model's spec page for current rates.Which has the larger context window?
Claude 3.5 Haiku accepts 200K tokens vs 128K for Phi-3.5 Medium.Is Claude 3.5 Haiku or Phi-3.5 Medium better for coding?
Both Claude 3.5 Haiku and Phi-3.5 Medium are competitive on coding benchmarks. See each model's individual spec page for HumanEval and SWE-bench scores where published. For an opinionated pick, consult our Best LLM for Coding ranking.Are either of these models open source?
Phi-3.5 Medium ships open weights (MIT). Claude 3.5 Haiku is API-only.When were Claude 3.5 Haiku and Phi-3.5 Medium released?
Claude 3.5 Haiku was released by Anthropic on 2024-11-04. Phi-3.5 Medium was released by Microsoft on 2024-08-20.
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