Claude 3 Opus vs Yi-Lightning

Performance benchmarks + pricing comparison — updated April 2026

Claude 3 Opus

Anthropic

First generation Opus. Highest reasoning capability in the Claude 3 family.

Input$15.00/M
Output$75.00/M
Context200K tokens
Best ForDeep analysis, complex coding tasks
Benchmark78/100

Yi-Lightning

01.ai

01.ai's cost-effective model. Competitive Chinese-English bilingual model at very low prices.

Input$0.150/M
Output$0.600/M
Context16K tokens
Best ForChinese-English translation, cost-sensitive applications

Cost Comparison by Scenario

Estimated cost per project with 30% cache hit rate. Actual costs may vary based on usage patterns.

ScenarioClaude 3 OpusYi-LightningSavings
Small Script (1K lines) $2.77 $0.02 Yi-Lightning saves $2.75 (99%)
Medium Feature (10K lines) $20.25 $0.17 Yi-Lightning saves $20.08 (99%)
Large Project (50K lines) $101.25 $0.86 Yi-Lightning saves $100.39 (99%)
Code Review (5K lines) $4.50 $0.04 Yi-Lightning saves $4.46 (99%)

Verdict

Yi-Lightning wins on both price and performance — $0.150/M input with a benchmark score of N/A/100.

For most developers, this is the clear choice between these two models.

Compare with Other Models