Comprehensive side-by-side LLM comparison
Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads with 73.4% higher average benchmark score. Claude Sonnet 4.6 offers 128.0K more tokens in context window than DeepSeek-V3.1. DeepSeek-V3.1 is $16.63 cheaper per million tokens. Claude Sonnet 4.6 supports multimodal inputs. Claude Sonnet 4.6 is available on 3 providers. Overall, Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the stronger choice for coding tasks.
Anthropic
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is a general-purpose language model from Anthropic, released in February 2026 as an update to the Sonnet 4 line that introduced adaptive thinking — a mode where the model automatically calibrates its reasoning depth based on task complexity rather than requiring manual configuration by the developer. The model accepts text and image inputs and integrates natively with web search and code execution tools, consolidating capabilities that previously required separate toolchain setup into a unified API surface. It became the primary workhorse model in the Claude 4 series for code assistance, agentic pipelines, and retrieval-augmented applications that benefit from built-in web access.
DeepSeek
DeepSeek-V3.1, released by DeepSeek in August 2025, is a hybrid large language model with 671 billion total parameters (37 billion active) that unifies the capabilities of DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1 in a single model. It features a 128K token context window and supports both direct generation and extended reasoning modes selectable via the chat template. DeepSeek-V3.1 targets general-purpose tasks, coding, and complex reasoning under an open MIT license.
6 months newer

DeepSeek-V3.1
DeepSeek
2025-08-21

Claude Sonnet 4.6
Anthropic
2026-02-17
Cost per million tokens (USD)
Claude Sonnet 4.6
DeepSeek-V3.1
Context window and performance specifications
Average performance across 1 common benchmarks
Claude Sonnet 4.6
DeepSeek-V3.1
Performance comparison across key benchmark categories
Claude Sonnet 4.6
DeepSeek-V3.1
Claude Sonnet 4.6
2025-08
Available providers and their performance metrics
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Anthropic
AWS Bedrock
Google Cloud Vertex AI
DeepSeek-V3.1
Claude Sonnet 4.6
DeepSeek-V3.1
Claude Sonnet 4.6
DeepSeek-V3.1
DeepSeek