Sonar Max on Arena Elo: score, rank and what it means
Sonar Max scores 1395.2 on Arena Elo, placing it #227 of 600 models in the index. The benchmark average is 1349.9 and the leader is Claude Opus 4.5 Max at 1501.9.
Score distribution
The chart shows the top 10 models on Arena Elo, with Sonar Max highlighted. Longer bars mean higher scores.
Top 10 leaderboard
| # | Model | Provider | Context | Input / 1M | Avg score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Claude Opus 4.5 Max | Anthropic | 1000000 | $20.90 | 87.8 |
| 2 | GPT-5.2 Reasoning | OpenAI | 1000000 | $20.98 | 87.5 |
| 3 | GPT-5.2 Turbo | OpenAI | 1000000 | $20.73 | 87.4 |
| 4 | Claude Opus 4.5 Reasoning | Anthropic | 2000000 | $20.91 | 88.2 |
| 5 | GPT-5.2 Max | OpenAI | 1000000 | $21.39 | 89.2 |
| 6 | Gemini 3 Pro Turbo | Google DeepMind | 400000 | $19.62 | 86.4 |
| 7 | Grok 4 Max | xAI | 2000000 | $19.70 | 86.6 |
| 8 | Claude Opus 4.5 | Anthropic | 400000 | $19.42 | 87.7 |
| 9 | GPT-5.1 Pro | OpenAI | 200000 | $19.77 | 87.8 |
| 10 | Grok 4 Reasoning | xAI | 2000000 | $19.67 | 87.8 |
What this score means
On Arena Elo, Sonar Max sits at #227 of 600. The leader, Claude Opus 4.5 Max, scores 1501.9, so the gap to the top is 106.7 points. The median model in this index scores 1373.8, which puts Sonar Max above the midpoint.
Perplexity models average 1390.9 on this benchmark. Sonar Max is 4.3 points above that provider line, so it is a stronger result than the average Perplexity model.
Among multimodal models, the average is 1409.6. Sonar Max is 14.4 points below that group. This is the more useful comparison if you are shortlisting within the same tier rather than across the whole index.
Read a 1395.2 as a relative signal, not an absolute guarantee. Benchmark scores depend on prompt format, evaluation harness and contamination controls. Use this page to narrow the shortlist, then test the model on your own data.
Price context
At $11.60 per million input tokens, Sonar Max is above the median input price of $4.00 across the 600 models scored on Arena Elo. The models immediately around it in the ranking are shown below so you can compare score and price together.
| Model | Provider | Context | Input / 1M | Avg score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Command R+ Instruct | Cohere | 200000 | $4.16 | 76.2 |
| Llama 3 Replicate Chat | Replicate | 200000 | $3.74 | 74.7 |
| Llama 4 Scout Base | Meta AI | 32768 | $3.95 | 75.3 |
| Llama 3.1 Instruct | Meta AI | 200000 | $4.05 | 75.7 |
| Sonar Max | Perplexity | 32768 | $11.60 | 77.8 |
| Llama 3 Novita Instruct | Novita AI | 32768 | $3.94 | 75.6 |
| Qwen3-Max Mini | Alibaba Cloud | 128000 | $11.13 | 76.5 |
Other benchmarks for Sonar Max
| Benchmark | Score | Rank | Percentile | Relative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MMLU-Pro | 81.3 | 141 | 77th | |
| GPQA Diamond | 73.7 | 180 | 70th | |
| SWE-bench Verified | 63.0 | 253 | 58th | |
| HumanEval | 82.1 | 186 | 69th | |
| MATH-500 | 83.3 | 143 | 76th | |
| AIME 2025 | 74.9 | 156 | 74th | |
| LiveCodeBench | 72.8 | 133 | 78th | |
| IFEval | 85.2 | 188 | 69th | |
| TruthfulQA | 78.9 | 224 | 63th | |
| HellaSwag | 85.3 | 232 | 61th | |
| MMMU | 75.4 | 156 | 74th |
FAQ
What score does Sonar Max get on Arena Elo?
Sonar Max scores 1395.2 on Arena Elo in this index. The benchmark average is 1349.9 and the top score is 1501.9.
How does Sonar Max rank on Arena Elo?
It ranks #227 of 600 models, in the 62nd percentile. The leader is Claude Opus 4.5 Max at 1501.9.
Is Sonar Max good at Arena Elo?
Yes, relative to the index: it is above the median and inside the top half of scores. The result should be read alongside its price and context window.
How is the Arena Elo score calculated?
Arena Elo is a preference benchmark. Scores in this index are modelled estimates on a 0–100 scale (or Elo for Arena), derived from capability tier and benchmark difficulty. They are not official leaderboard results.
What does Sonar Max cost?
Sonar Max costs $11.60 per million input tokens and $42.81 per million output tokens.