How to Choose the Right Claude Model
You will know which Claude model (Haiku, Sonnet or Opus) fits each kind of task, how to switch between them in the model selector, and how to match your choice to the plan you pay for.
Was Sie brauchen
A Claude account (claude.ai)
A paid Claude plan (the video compares the $20 and $100 plans)
Schritt für Schritt
Learn the three model tiers
Claude comes in three sizes. Haiku is the smallest and fastest, Sonnet sits in the middle, and Opus is the biggest but also the slowest. The smaller the model, the less it costs you; the bigger the model, the more you pay to make it think.
Open Claudehttps://claude.ai
Use Haiku for simple, high-volume tasks
Pick Haiku when you need fast, cheap answers on simple work: - Quick Q&A from an FAQ document - Text classification and tagging of documents - Moderation of chat, mail or client-facing documentation - Data extraction from documents, even flipped or stained images
Avoid it for analysis, and check that what it extracts is true.
Select Haiku in the model selector
In the Claude app, click the model selector button. You will see Opus, Sonnet and Haiku. Select Haiku. You can turn on extended thinking here, but I find it is not really useful for Haiku 4.5.
Make Sonnet your default
Use Sonnet 4.6 for most business work. It balances speed and analysis, uses far fewer tokens than Opus, follows complex instructions reliably, and can analyze several documents at once to find correlations. Good fits: content creation and editing, research with deep research, and code generation.
Let adaptive thinking decide how hard to think
Select Sonnet in the model selector. The toggle changes from extended thinking to adaptive thinking: the model decides on its own how much to reason. Writing an email gets little reasoning; finding correlations across three to five reports from different sources gets its full thinking capacity.
Save Opus for deep, creative or technical work
Use Opus 4.7 for creative tasks, complex technical analysis, heavy code work, and when you need several pieces of output. It has the strongest reasoning, but it is slow and can overthink simple problems. Stick to Sonnet and move up to Opus only for precise use cases.
Select Opus when you need it
Open the model selector and select Claude Opus 4.7. Like Sonnet, it uses adaptive thinking, not extended thinking.
Match your model to your plan
On the $20 plan: use Sonnet 4.6 for most tasks, drop to Haiku for high-volume searching or tagging (for example inside emails), and go up to Opus 4.7 for marketing, creative or analysis work.
On the $100 plan: stay on Opus 4.7 and drop to Sonnet 4.6 if you keep hitting the rate limit.
Worauf Sie achten sollten
Using Opus for everything on the $20 plan burns through your usage quickly.
Opus is slow and can overthink simple problems, so it is not automatically the best choice for business tasks.
Haiku is not strong enough for analysis, and you still need to check the data it extracts.
Extended thinking on Haiku 4.5 adds little, so do not rely on it to make Haiku smarter.
