DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision Exp vs Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5 (batch)
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-10-06.
| DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision Exp | Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5 (batch) | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | deepseek | anthropic |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 57.7 | 63.9 |
| Input Price | $0.22/M | $1.00/M |
| Output Price | $0.65/M | $5.00/M |
| Context Window | 1,048,576 | 1,000,000 |
| Max Output | 262,144 | 128,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 57.5 | 63.0 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision Exp costs $0.38 and Claude Sonnet 5 (batch) costs $2.25, so DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision Exp is about 6.0 times cheaper for the same work.
Both take in a similar amount of text: 1,048,576 and 1,000,000 tokens, about 1,573 and 1,500 pages.
On our blended benchmark score Claude Sonnet 5 (batch) leads 63.9 to 57.7.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision Exp scores higher on 7 (Code Completion, Code Documentation, Regex Writing and others), Claude Sonnet 5 (batch) on 13 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision Exp was released in August 2026 and Claude Sonnet 5 (batch) in June 2026.
Pick DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision Exp if you need lower cost; pick Claude Sonnet 5 (batch) if you need benchmark performance.
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 | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision Exp | Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 5 (batch) |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 140 | 141 |
| Code Review | 142 | 144 |
| Code Completion | 133 | 120 |
| Code Refactoring | 145 | 146 |
| Bug Fixing | 146 | 148 |
| Unit Test Generation | 130 | 131 |
| Code Documentation | 137 | 136 |
| Regex Writing | 125 | 125 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 126 | 127 |
| Frontend Component Design | 128 | 129 |
| Data Analysis | 132 | 133 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 136 | 135 |
| ETL Scripting | 136 | 136 |
| JSON Extraction | 131 | 122 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 129 | 120 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 133 | 134 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 133 | 134 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 147 | 147 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 126 | 118 |
| Blog Post Writing | 128 | 129 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →