Claude 3.5 Sonnet vs DeepSeek R1: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Pricing verified Apr 8, 2026

⚡ Quick Answer

Compare Claude 3.5 Sonnet and DeepSeek R1 across pricing, benchmarks, and capabilities.

Updated: April 8, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureClaude 3.5 SonnetDeepSeek R1
ProviderAnthropicDeepSeek
Input Price / 1M tokens$3.00$0.700
Output Price / 1M tokens$15.00$2.50
Context Window
200K
128K
Max Output Tokens
8,192
8,192
Arena ELO
1,270
1,310
Coding ELO
1,300
1,330
TTFT (ms)
150
1,800
Tokens/sec
100
45
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesNo
VisionNoNo
When to Use Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Claude 3.5 Sonnet excels at coding, general-purpose, multimodal tasks.

Strengths:

  • Best coding
  • Large context
  • Strong reasoning

Best for:

codinggeneral-purposemultimodal
When to Use DeepSeek R1

DeepSeek R1 excels at reasoning, math, coding, science tasks.

Strengths:

  • Excellent reasoning at a fraction of o3's cost
  • Open-source and self-hostable
  • Top-tier math performance
  • Very competitive with proprietary reasoning models

Best for:

reasoningmathcodingscience

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