Model comparison
Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs DeepSeek V4 Pro
Claude Sonnet 4.6's multimodal support contrasts with DeepSeek V4 Pro's focus on text-only and cost efficiency.
Anthropic
Claude Sonnet 4.6
The pragmatic default — Claude quality without Opus pricing.
DeepSeek
DeepSeek V4 Pro
The price collapse — frontier quality at a fraction of the cost.
Specs
| Metric | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | DeepSeek V4 Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Context window | 1M tokens | 1.0M tokens↑ |
| Input $/1M tokens | $3.00 | $0.435↑ |
| Output $/1M tokens | $15.00 | $0.870↑ |
| Modalities | Text · Image | Text |
| Open weights | No | Yes |
| Released | — | Dec 2024 |
Capability differences
| Capability | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | DeepSeek V4 Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Vision | Yes | No |
| Extended thinking | Yes | No |
| Open weights | No | Yes |
How they differ
Context handling
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Claude Sonnet 4.6 supports up to 1,000,000 tokens and can process both text and image inputs.
DeepSeek V4 Pro
DeepSeek V4 Pro supports up to 1,048,576 tokens but is limited to text-only processing.
Cost profile
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs $3.0 per million input tokens and $15.0 per million output tokens.
DeepSeek V4 Pro
DeepSeek V4 Pro has a significantly lower cost at $0.435 per million input tokens and $0.87 per million output tokens.
Vision
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Claude Sonnet 4.6 includes multimodal functionality, allowing it to process image and text inputs.
DeepSeek V4 Pro
DeepSeek V4 Pro does not support image processing and is text-centric.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 — what sets it apart
- +Claude Sonnet 4.6 supports multimodal inputs, including image analysis.
- +Claude Sonnet 4.6 provides advanced safety mechanisms to guide responsible usage.
DeepSeek V4 Pro — what sets it apart
- +DeepSeek V4 Pro is substantially more cost-effective for text-based tasks.
- +DeepSeek V4 Pro has a slightly larger token context limit, which may benefit large-scale text processing.
The most consequential difference is Claude Sonnet 4.6's multimodal capabilities versus DeepSeek V4 Pro's cost-oriented design for text-heavy applications.
Analysis synthesized from gpt-4o, llama-4-maverick, phi-4, etc.