LLMversus

DeepSeek R1 vs Claude Opus 4: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Pricing verified Apr 20, 2026By LLMversusUpdated June 16, 2026View methodology

⚡ Quick Answer

Compare DeepSeek R1 and Claude Opus 4 across pricing, benchmarks, and capabilities.

Updated: April 20, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureDeepSeek R1Claude Opus 4
ProviderDeepSeekAnthropic
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.500$5.00
Output Price / 1M tokens$2.15$25.00
Context Window
128K
200K
Max Output Tokens
8,192
32,000
Arena ELO
1,310
1,503
Coding ELO
1,330
1,503
TTFT (ms)
1,800
500
Tokens/sec
45
50
MultimodalNoYes
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingNoYes
VisionNoYes
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
When to Use Claude Opus 4

Claude Opus 4 excels at coding, analysis, agents, complex-reasoning tasks.

Strengths:

  • Top-tier coding and reasoning
  • Excellent agentic capabilities
  • Strong instruction following
  • 200K context window

Best for:

codinganalysisagentscomplex-reasoning

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