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Claude Opus 4 vs DeepSeek V3: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

DeepSeek V3 is significantly cheaper at $0.27/$1.10 per million tokens vs $15.00/$75.00. Claude Opus 4 is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1360 vs 1300. DeepSeek V3 is faster at 85 tokens/sec vs 50 tokens/sec. Claude Opus 4 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1330 vs 1280. Claude Opus 4 offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureClaude Opus 4DeepSeek V3
ProviderAnthropicDeepSeek
Input Price / 1M tokens$15.00$0.270
Output Price / 1M tokens$75.00$1.10
Context Window200K128K
Max Output Tokens32,0008,192
Arena ELO1,3301,280
Coding ELO1,3601,300
TTFT (ms)500220
Tokens/sec5085
MultimodalYesNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionYesNo
When to Use Claude Opus 4

Choose Claude Opus 4 when you need: top-tier coding and reasoning, excellent agentic capabilities, strong instruction following, 200k context window. It excels at coding, analysis, agents, complex-reasoning tasks. Its 200K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • Top-tier coding and reasoning
  • Excellent agentic capabilities
  • Strong instruction following
  • 200K context window

Best for:

codinganalysisagentscomplex-reasoning
When to Use DeepSeek V3

Choose DeepSeek V3 when you need: excellent coding performance for its price, open-source and self-hostable, very competitive benchmarks, extremely affordable. It excels at coding, general-purpose, cost-sensitive, open-source tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

Strengths:

  • Excellent coding performance for its price
  • Open-source and self-hostable
  • Very competitive benchmarks
  • Extremely affordable

Best for:

codinggeneral-purposecost-sensitiveopen-source

Frequently Asked Questions

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