Is Phi-3.5 Medium or Sonar Large 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?

Phi-3.5 Medium accepts 128K tokens vs 127K for Sonar Large.

Is Phi-3.5 Medium or Sonar Large better for coding?

Both Phi-3.5 Medium and Sonar Large 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.

When were Phi-3.5 Medium and Sonar Large released?

Phi-3.5 Medium was released by Microsoft on 2024-08-20. Sonar Large was released by Perplexity on 2024-11-19.

Is Phi-3.5 Medium or Sonar Large 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?

Phi-3.5 Medium accepts 128K tokens vs 127K for Sonar Large.

Is Phi-3.5 Medium or Sonar Large better for coding?

Both Phi-3.5 Medium and Sonar Large 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.

When were Phi-3.5 Medium and Sonar Large released?

Phi-3.5 Medium was released by Microsoft on 2024-08-20. Sonar Large was released by Perplexity on 2024-11-19.

Phi-3.5 Medium vs Sonar Large

A complete head-to-head: pricing, context window, benchmarks, modality coverage, and openness, with a programmatic verdict synthesized from the underlying data.

UpdatedApr 30, 2026

Phi-3.5 Medium specs · Sonar Large specs

Verdict by category

PriceSonar Large
Sonar Large publishes pricing ($1.00 / 1M output tokens) while Phi-3.5 Medium does not.
Context windowPhi-3.5 Medium
Phi-3.5 Medium accepts 128K tokens vs 127K, 1.0× 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.
ModalitiesTie
Both handle text.
OpennessPhi-3.5 Medium
Phi-3.5 Medium ships open weights (MIT); Sonar Large is API-only.

On balance Phi-3.5 Medium edges ahead, winning 2 of 5 categories against Sonar Large's 1. Sonar Large publishes pricing ($1.00 / 1M output tokens) while Phi-3.5 Medium does not. Phi-3.5 Medium accepts 128K tokens vs 127K, 1.0× the room for long documents and codebases.

No directly comparable public benchmarks are available for both models, check the spec sheets for individual scores. Both target the same set of modalities (text), so the deciding factors are price, context, and raw quality. Phi-3.5 Medium ships open weights (MIT); Sonar Large is API-only.

Sonar Large 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. Phi-3.5 Medium is usually picked for on device and edge deployment workloads, while Sonar Large sees more deployments in research agent and rag. If pricing matters more than every last benchmark point, run the numbers in the calculator below before committing.

Side-by-side specs

Spec	Phi-3.5 Medium	Sonar Large
Provider	Microsoft	Perplexity
Released	Aug 2024	Nov 2024
Modalities	text	text
Context window	128K tokens	127K tokens
Max output	,	,
Input · 1M	Pricing not published	$1.00 / 1M tokens
Output · 1M	Pricing not published	$1.00 / 1M tokens
Knowledge cutoff	,	,
Open weights	Yes (MIT)	No
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, vs $4.50
Heavy usage, 1M in / 500k out per day, vs $45.00
RAG workload, 5M in / 200k out per day, vs $156

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).

Price calculator

Estimated spend for the listed models at your usage. Numbers are derived from each model's published per-million-token rates.

Input tokens / dayOutput tokens / dayHorizon

Phi-3.5 MediumPricing unavailable
Sonar Large$0.150

Benchmarks compared

Only sourced numbers. Where a benchmark is missing for one model we show the available value rather than fabricating the other.

Phi-3.5 MediumSonar Large

MMLU78.9

Pick Phi-3.5 Medium if

Phi-3.5 Medium fits when…

MIT license
128k context
Strong reasoning at 14B
Self-hosting and on-prem requirements, open weights (MIT).

Pick Sonar Large if

Sonar Large fits when…

Web-search grounded
Citation-first output
Cheap

Don't want either?

Consider Phi-4

Microsoft's 14B model, exceptional quality-per-parameter via curated synthetic training data.

See Phi-4 specs Phi-3.5 Medium vs Phi-4 Sonar Large vs Phi-4

Frequently asked

Is Phi-3.5 Medium or Sonar Large 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?
Phi-3.5 Medium accepts 128K tokens vs 127K for Sonar Large.
Is Phi-3.5 Medium or Sonar Large better for coding?
Both Phi-3.5 Medium and Sonar Large 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). Sonar Large is API-only.
When were Phi-3.5 Medium and Sonar Large released?
Phi-3.5 Medium was released by Microsoft on 2024-08-20. Sonar Large was released by Perplexity on 2024-11-19.

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