Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 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 Sonnet 4.5DeepSeek: R1
Input $/Mtok$3.00 · $0.70
Output $/Mtok$15.00 · $2.50
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5DeepSeek: R1
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.51000K tokens
DeepSeek: R164K tokens
Bars use square-root scaling so a 1M-token window doesn't crush a 200K one.
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5DeepSeek: R1
2025-09-29
2025-01-20
2024-12-21today
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5
- Provider
- anthropic
- Context
- 1000k
- Input $/Mtok
- $3.00
- Output $/Mtok
- $15.00
- Max output
- 64000
- Modalities
- text, image, file
DeepSeek: R1
- Provider
- deepseek
- Context
- 64k
- Input $/Mtok
- $0.70
- Output $/Mtok
- $2.50
- Max output
- 16000
- Modalities
- text
Price delta
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 is $2.30/Mtok more expensive than DeepSeek: R1 on input. Output: Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 is $12.50/Mtok more expensive than DeepSeek: R1.
Which to pick
Pick **Claude Sonnet 4.5** when the conversation is coding alongside teammates, drafting writing for review, or working with files where Anthropic's tool-use shape is already in your pipeline. The 200k context, polished prose, and consistent refusal behaviour make Sonnet the easier daily driver for a team Space.
Pick **DeepSeek R1** when reasoning per dollar is the metric. At $0.55 in / $2.19 out per Mtok it's roughly 5x cheaper on input than Sonnet ($3) and over 6x cheaper on output ($15) — and on math, algorithmic code, and structured reasoning it lands in the same competitive range. Expect rougher prose and weaker general-purpose ergonomics; reach for R1 on the analytical lanes, not the customer-facing ones.