Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 vs DeepSeek: R1
Side-by-side specs, pricing, and benchmarks. Pick a winner for your team's use case.
Use it in a Space
Spin up a Switchy Space with either model — your whole team @-mentions it with shared context, pooled credits, one memory.
Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5DeepSeek: R1
Input $/Mtok$5.00 · $0.70
Output $/Mtok$25.00 · $2.50
Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5DeepSeek: R1
Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5200K tokens
DeepSeek: R164K tokens
Bars use square-root scaling so a 1M-token window doesn't crush a 200K one.
Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5DeepSeek: R1
2025-11-24
2025-01-20
2024-12-21today
Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5
- Provider
- anthropic
- Context
- 200k
- Input $/Mtok
- $5.00
- Output $/Mtok
- $25.00
- Max output
- 64000
- Modalities
- file, image, text
DeepSeek: R1
- Provider
- deepseek
- Context
- 64k
- Input $/Mtok
- $0.70
- Output $/Mtok
- $2.50
- Max output
- 16000
- Modalities
- text
Price delta
Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 is $4.30/Mtok more expensive than DeepSeek: R1 on input. Output: Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 is $22.50/Mtok more expensive than DeepSeek: R1.
Which to pick
Pick **Claude Opus 4.5** when you need polished prose alongside the reasoning — long-form writing, customer-facing documents, anything where tone, refusal behaviour, and consistent formatting carry weight. Opus's reasoning quality is at the same frontier tier as R1 on most evals; you're paying for the surrounding craft.
Pick **DeepSeek R1** for raw reasoning on a budget. At $0.55 in / $2.19 out per Mtok it is roughly 27x cheaper than Opus on input and 34x cheaper on output, with reasoning quality that's competitive on math, code, and step-by-step problem solving. The trade-off is rougher prose, weaker tool-use ergonomics, and a 164k context (vs Opus's 200k) — but on hard reasoning per dollar it's hard to beat.