Claude Fable 5vsStep 3.5 Flash
Claude Fable 5 leads the overall Podium Score by 23.4 points (93.4 vs 70.0).Category wins: Claude Fable 5 0 — 0 Step 3.5 Flash.Step 3.5 Flash is the cheaper pick ($3/M vs $50/M per 1M output tokens). Claude Fable 5 is faster (71 t/s vs 50 t/s).
Key VerdictAggregated 2026 Benchmark Analysis
Claude Fable 5 is rated higher overall with a Podium Score of 93.4 (vs 70.0 for Step 3.5 Flash). Both models show closely matched capabilities across domain benchmarks.
Coding & Engineering
Comparable
Inference Speed
Claude Fable 5 (71 t/s)
Cost Efficiency
Step 3.5 Flash ($3/M/M)
| Metric | Claude Fable 5 | Step 3.5 Flash |
|---|---|---|
| Podium Score | 93.4 ▲ | 70.0 |
| Arena Elo | 1509 | — |
| Intelligence Index | 60.0 | — |
| Coding | 84.1 | — |
| Math | — | — |
| Reasoning | 81.0 | — |
| Agentic | 96.2 | — |
| Knowledge | 43.3 | — |
| Multimodal | — | — |
| Long-context | 99.2 | — |
| Output speed | 71 t/s ▲ | 50 t/s |
| Output price | $50/M | $3/M ▲ |
| Context window | 1000K ▲ | 128K |
Scores aggregated from five independent leaderboards. See Methodology. More head-to-heads: Claude Fable 5 vs Claude Mythos · Claude Fable 5 vs Kimi K3 · Claude Fable 5 vs Claude Opus 5 · Claude Fable 5 vs GPT-5.6 Sol