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Claude Sonnet 4.5 vs DeepSeek V3

Bottom line

DeepSeek V3 is open source and Claude Sonnet 4.5 is not. You can run DeepSeek V3 on your own machine or server; Claude Sonnet 4.5 is hosted by the vendor.

Which one should you try?

Claude Sonnet 4.5

Freemium

Best for Coding and software engineering tasks

Visit Claude Sonnet 4.5 See full review

DeepSeek V3

Freemium

Best for Cost-sensitive organizations requiring frontier-class performance

Visit DeepSeek V3 See full review

Pricing, capabilities and platforms side by side. Prices are as of the "Pricing checked" date in the table.

Claude Sonnet 4.5

Claude Sonnet 4.5

Claude Sonnet 4.5 is a large language model from Anthropic with particular strengths in software coding, agentic tasks where it runs in a loop and uses tools, and in using computers. The model maintains focus for more than 30 hours on complex, multi-step tasks. Pricing remains the same as Claude Sonnet 4, at $3/$15 per million tokens. It is the most aligned frontier model Anthropic has released, showing large improvements across several areas of alignment compared to previous Claude models.

DeepSeek V3

DeepSeek V3

A fast, chat-based, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model from DeepSeek.

AttributeClaude Sonnet 4.5DeepSeek V3
PricingFreemiumFreemium
Price$20/mo$0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens
Pricing checkedJun 11, 2026Not checked yet
Free trialNot statedNot stated
Open sourceNoYes
Has APIYesYes
Self-hosted optionNoYes
PlatformsClaude API (claude-sonnet-4-5), Claude.ai web interface, iOS and Android apps, Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AIHugging Face, GitHub, DeepSeek API, multiple cloud providers (Cerebras, DeepInfra, Together, OpenRouter, Fireworks, Hyperbolic, SambaNova)
LanguagesSupports input and output in multiple languagesSupports multiple languages, allowing input and output in several languages
Released2025-09-292024-12-26
Pros
  • State-of-the-art on SWE-bench Verified evaluation for software coding abilities.
  • Significant leap forward on computer use, leading at 61.4% on OSWorld benchmark.
  • Most aligned frontier model with reduced concerning behaviors like sycophancy, deception, and power-seeking.
  • Can maintain focus for more than 30 hours on complex multi-step tasks.
  • Cost-effective at $0.27 per million input tokens and $1.10 per million output tokens
  • Fast throughput at approximately 60 tokens per second, 3x faster than DeepSeek-V2
  • Fully open-source weights available under MIT License for local deployment
  • Performance comparable to GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet
  • Outperforms other open-source models across multiple benchmarks
Cons
  • Context window limited to 200K tokens; 1M context beta was deprecated by Anthropic on April 30th 2026.
  • Maximum output capacity of 64K tokens is lower than some competing models.
  • Context window significantly smaller than some competitors
  • Does not support tool calling (functions)
  • Does not support vision capabilities

Made up your mind?

Claude Sonnet 4.5

Freemium

Best for Coding and software engineering tasks

Visit Claude Sonnet 4.5 See full review

DeepSeek V3

Freemium

Best for Cost-sensitive organizations requiring frontier-class performance

Visit DeepSeek V3 See full review

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Specs come from each tool's own site and docs (how we test). AIDiveForge is editorially independent.

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