Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs DeepSeek-V3: Detailed Comparison
Choosing between Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic) and
DeepSeek-V3 (DeepSeek) comes down to three things:
per-token pricing, context window, and which capability matters most for your workload.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs $3.00/M input vs
$0.27/M for DeepSeek-V3;
context windows are 200K vs
128K tokens. Detailed breakdown below.
Side-by-side specs
| Spec | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | DeepSeek-V3 |
|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | DeepSeek |
|---|
| Released | 2026-03-12 | 2024-12-26 |
|---|
| Input price |
$3.00/M |
$0.27/M |
| Output price |
$15.00/M |
$1.10/M |
| Cached input |
$0.3000/M |
$0.0700/M |
| Context window |
200K |
128K |
| Max output |
64K |
8K |
| Modalities |
text image |
text |
| Tokenizer |
claude-3 |
deepseek |
Capability matrix
| Capability | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | DeepSeek-V3 |
|---|
| function calling |
Yes |
Yes |
| json mode |
Yes |
Yes |
| vision |
Yes |
No |
| streaming |
Yes |
Yes |
| tool use |
Yes |
No |
Benchmark comparison
Higher is better for all benchmarks shown.
Per-call cost on typical workloads
| Workload (in/out tokens) | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | DeepSeek-V3 | Cheaper by |
|---|
| Standard chat (1K / 500) |
$0.010500 |
$0.000820 |
DeepSeek-V3 by $0.009680 |
| RAG (4K / 500) |
$0.019500 |
$0.001630 |
DeepSeek-V3 by $0.017870 |
| Long doc (20K / 1K) |
$0.075000 |
$0.006500 |
DeepSeek-V3 by $0.068500 |
| Very long context (100K / 2K) |
$0.322500 |
$0.028650 |
DeepSeek-V3 by $0.293850 |
When to choose Claude Sonnet 4.6 over DeepSeek-V3
- Larger context window (200K vs 128K) — relevant when whole documents or long histories must fit in a single call.
- Supports vision — DeepSeek-V3 does not.
- Supports tool use — DeepSeek-V3 does not.
When to choose DeepSeek-V3 over Claude Sonnet 4.6
- Per-token input cost is 91% lower than Claude Sonnet 4.6.
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