Opus 5.5 vs Fable 5.1: I Tested Every Effort Level on a Lead Magnet

I ran Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Fable 5.1 head-to-head on every effort level, from low all the way to max. Ten runs, same prompt, one job: build a lead magnet landing page for Alex Hormozi's new bonus book.

Opus won at every single level. Opus on Medium beat Fable on Max. And if you only take one thing from this post, take this: Opus 5.5 on High is the one I'd use.

Here's the full breakdown.

The test

I built a small benchmark tool for these videos. It runs the same prompt across models and effort levels side by side, then shows me the outputs, the run times, and the estimated cost.

For this one I wanted a practical business use case, not a toy. So the task was: research Alex Hormozi's new bonus book, go fetch the creative (his photo, the book covers, the Acquisition.com branding), and build the lead magnet page.

One important detail. The prompt was a beginner prompt on purpose. No detailed PRD, no spec sheet, no brand guide pasted in. I wanted to see which model a beginner should pick to build a lead magnet for their business, their product, or a client.

All 10 runs kicked off at once and started searching right away.

First glance: Opus found his face, Fable didn't

Before I opened a single page, the side-by-side grid told the story.

Fable's row didn't scream Alex Hormozi at all. Opus went out and grabbed the masked photo of him that he uses across his content and landing pages. Right out of the gate, Opus looked like the winner [01:33].

The timing made no sense on Fable

The run times were the first surprise.

Opus 5.5 was the fastest overall, and its runs behaved the way you'd expect: low to max, fastest to longest, no surprises.

Fable was all over the place:

• Fable Medium took 30 minutes and 18 seconds
• Fable High finished faster than Fable Medium
• Fable Max finished almost 20 minutes faster than Fable Extra High

I don't have a good explanation for that. Higher effort should cost more time, not less.

Fable 5.1, level by level

Low. I gave it everything it needed and it didn't even pull his image. I didn't spend more time on it.

Medium. A little better, but this is the one that took half an hour. It defaulted to a gold-and-black look. Acquisition.com is predominantly purple with a corporate feel. This didn't read as his brand.

High. Names were correct, release dates looked right, but still no proper brand assets and still no Hormozi photo.

Extra High. Now we're getting some of the Acquisition branding and what looks like a real copy of the book cover. Attention to detail improved quite a bit.

Max. The most polished Fable output. It pulled the cover, and I liked the highlighter-yellow accent. One UX miss: the "Send me this chapter" button scrolls you back to the top.

And across all five levels, Fable never fetched the Hormozi avatar. Not once.

On cost, Fable came in at $3.32 on Low, roughly $6.41 on Medium, and $6.26 on High (yes, High cost less than Medium). Extra High and Max were a dollar apart at about $14 and $15.

Opus 5.5, level by level

Low. I looked at this and kind of puked. To be fair, it still reads like a Hormozi-style landing page, but I wouldn't use it.

Medium. This is where it got interesting. Opus Medium grabbed his photo, pulled a rendition of the book cover, and nailed the "normally free" offer framing. Put it next to Fable and it doesn't even compare. In my opinion, Opus Medium outperformed Fable Max [07:54].

High. The winner. It got the purple-to-dark-purple gradient grid background. It used a different photo of him. It added Leila and Alex further down. And the part I loved most: pill tags on each lost chapter, color-coded to the book it comes from. Out of all ten runs, High was the only one to do that across the whole page.

Extra High. Very similar to High, with a nice hover effect. But there was a lot of wasted space, and it lost the per-chapter book tagging. Did it overthink it? Did it try to do too much? High nailed the thing Extra High dropped.

Max. Super polished above the fold and right below it. Subtle animation, backlinks, some killer little creations. But it hides too much of the hero photo, and the attention to detail fades further down the page.

Why High over Max

This was a tough call between High and Max. I went with High because it needs fewer edits. If I were going to send this off to Alex (not that he'd ever see it), High is the one that did the better job of one-shotting it.

Speed and cost back that up:

• Medium to High is only about a $2 difference at retail API prices
• High is about 10 minutes faster and almost $3 cheaper than Extra High

I don't personally focus on cost because we use subscriptions around here, but I know it matters to a lot of you, so I wanted to show it.

Key takeaways

Cross Fable off the list for this kind of work. Right now I wouldn't use Fable 5.1 for landing pages, websites, or lead funnels. It's slower and more expensive, and the output is worse. I only use it for deep thinking and research, then hand that off to Opus.

Opus 5.5 is my daily driver. I run it on High to Extra High for almost everything, sometimes Max. For some agents I use Medium, though my agents are still routed through my ChatGPT subscription for now. I also don't hit usage window limits like I used to on ChatGPT.

Opus High is the beginner's pick. With a simple prompt and no PRD, it gave the most complete one-shot result. Give it a proper PRD with more specifics and I'd expect even better.

This will change. Fable 5.5 is probably right around the corner, and depending on when you read this the picture could be different. For now, the results speak for themselves.

One honest note: my benchmark tool is a week old and still buggy. A couple of views didn't load during the Max run. We'll sort that out.

Try it yourself

Pick a real offer from your business or a client, write the simplest prompt you can, and run it on Opus 5.5 High. If the first pass needs more than a handful of edits, bump to Extra High and compare. That's the whole test.

If you'd like me to make a video around a specific topic, drop a comment on the video. Tell me who you are, what you do, who your target audience is, and what your question is, and I'll add a custom video to my queue.

Watch the full test here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prs9Buqjm7w