Claude Sonnet 4.5 vs DeepSeek R1
Claude Sonnet 4.5 vs DeepSeek R1: DeepSeek R1 is cheaper by 64% on average. Claude Sonnet 4.5 from Anthropic (200,000-token context, reasoning, tool calls) vs. DeepSeek R1 from Azure AI Foundry (128,000-token context, reasoning). Use Agent Command Center to A/B both in shadow mode and pick the winner per workload.
Side-by-side cost
Live workload comparison
Same workload run through both models. The cheaper one is highlighted.
3,000
0200,000
400
064,000
5,000
01,000,000
At this workload, DeepSeek R1 is 59% cheaper than Claude Sonnet 4.5 — a savings of $1,338/month ($16,053/year).
Production recipe — Agent Command Center
strategy: cost-optimized
primary:
model: deepseek-r1
provider: azure-ai-foundry
fallback:
model: claude-sonnet-4-5
provider: anthropic
shadow: { sample_rate: 0.05 } # mirror 5% of traffic to compare quality live| Claude Sonnet 4.5 | DeepSeek R1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $3.00/M | $1.35/M |
| Output price | $15.00/M | $5.40/M |
| Context window | 200,000 | 128,000 |
| Max output | 64,000 | 8,192 |
| Function calling | ✓ | — |
| Vision | ✓ | — |
| Audio input | — | — |
| Reasoning | ✓ | ✓ |
| Prompt caching | ✓ | — |
| Structured output | ✓ | — |
| Pricing verified | May 12, 2026 | May 12, 2026 |
Benchmark comparison
Side-by-side public benchmark scores. Greener bar = winner.
Chatbot Arena ELOgeneral
Claude Sonnet 4.5
1,454
DeepSeek R1
1,361
AIME 2025math
Claude Sonnet 4.5
100.0%
DeepSeek R1
—
MATH-500math⚠ different settings
Claude Sonnet 4.5
88.0%
DeepSeek R1
97.3%
HumanEvalcode
Claude Sonnet 4.5
93.7%
DeepSeek R1
89.7%
MMLU-Proreasoning
Claude Sonnet 4.5
87.4%
DeepSeek R1
84.0%
GPQA Diamondreasoning⚠ different settings
Claude Sonnet 4.5
84.4%
DeepSeek R1
71.5%
SWE-bench Verifiedagent
Claude Sonnet 4.5
82.0%
DeepSeek R1
49.2%
AIME 2024math
Claude Sonnet 4.5
79.6%
DeepSeek R1
79.8%
Aider Polyglotcode
Claude Sonnet 4.5
77.8%
DeepSeek R1
57.0%
LiveCodeBenchcode
Claude Sonnet 4.5
67.4%
DeepSeek R1
65.9%