Model comparison
DeepSeek V4 Pro vs Claude Sonnet 4.6
Claude Sonnet 4.6's multimodal support contrasts with DeepSeek V4 Pro's focus on text-only and cost efficiency.
DeepSeek
DeepSeek V4 Pro
The price collapse — frontier quality at a fraction of the cost.
Anthropic
Claude Sonnet 4.6
The pragmatic default — Claude quality without Opus pricing.
Specs
| Metric | DeepSeek V4 Pro | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| Context window | 1.0M tokens↑ | 1M tokens |
| Input $/1M tokens | $0.435↑ | $3.00 |
| Output $/1M tokens | $0.870↑ | $15.00 |
| Modalities | Text | Text · Image |
| Open weights | Yes | No |
| Released | Dec 2024 | — |
Capability differences
| Capability | DeepSeek V4 Pro | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| Vision | No | Yes |
| Extended thinking | No | Yes |
| Open weights | Yes | No |
How they differ
Context handling
DeepSeek V4 Pro
DeepSeek V4 Pro supports up to 1,048,576 tokens but is limited to text-only processing.
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Claude Sonnet 4.6 supports up to 1,000,000 tokens and can process both text and image inputs.
Cost profile
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.
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs $3.0 per million input tokens and $15.0 per million output tokens.
Vision
DeepSeek V4 Pro
DeepSeek V4 Pro does not support image processing and is text-centric.
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Claude Sonnet 4.6 includes multimodal functionality, allowing it to process image and text inputs.
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.
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.
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.