ByteDance Seed: Seed-2.0-Lite vs Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| ByteDance Seed: Seed-2.0-Lite | Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | bytedance-seed | anthropic |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | - | 80.1 |
| Input Price | $0.25/M | $3.00/M |
| Output Price | $2.00/M | $15.00/M |
| Context Window | 262,144 | 1,000,000 |
| Max Output | 131,072 | 128,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | - | 77.9 |
| ai_index_agentic | - | 67.3 |
| ai_index_coding | - | 100.0 |
| aider_polyglot | - | 61.3 |
| eqbench | - | 68.4 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Seed-2.0-Lite costs $0.75 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs $6.75, so Seed-2.0-Lite is about 9.0 times cheaper for the same work.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 reads up to 1,000,000 tokens at once, roughly 1,500 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Seed-2.0-Lite.
Only Seed-2.0-Lite offers video input.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Seed-2.0-Lite scores higher on 2 (Code Completion, Bulk Data Labeling), Claude Sonnet 4.6 on 18 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
Seed-2.0-Lite was released in March 2026 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 in February 2026.
Pick Seed-2.0-Lite if you need lower cost or video input; pick Claude Sonnet 4.6 if you need long documents or the stronger all-round task scores.
Costs use current list prices per million tokens; page counts assume about 0.75 words per token and 500 words per page.
Who wins by task?
| Task | ByteDance Seed: Seed-2.0-Lite | Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 131 | 183 |
| Code Review | 126 | 183 |
| Code Completion | 128 | 120 |
| Code Refactoring | 127 | 179 |
| Bug Fixing | 130 | 196 |
| Unit Test Generation | 121 | 166 |
| Code Documentation | 126 | 148 |
| Regex Writing | 119 | 139 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 117 | 155 |
| Frontend Component Design | 122 | 154 |
| Data Analysis | 124 | 183 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 128 | 163 |
| ETL Scripting | 122 | 167 |
| JSON Extraction | 131 | 142 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 129 | 124 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 128 | 152 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 128 | 152 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 129 | 172 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 123 | 124 |
| Blog Post Writing | 119 | 147 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →