Claude Opus 5 vs DeepSeek-R1
Anthropic vs DeepSeek · Prices checked 12 August 2026
DeepSeek-R1 is the cheaper of the two by a wide margin: $1.04 per million tokens blended against $11.00, roughly 10.6× less. A single 100K-input, 10K-output job costs $0.077 on DeepSeek-R1 against $0.750 on Claude Opus 5.
Claude Opus 5 takes a 1,000,000-token context window against 64,000, giving 15.6× more room for long documents or whole-codebase work.
Pricing and capacity
| Metric | Claude Opus 5 | DeepSeek-R1 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Input / 1M tokens | $5.00 | $0.550 | 9.1× |
| Output / 1M tokens | $25.00 | $2.19 | 11.4× |
| Blended · 70/30calculated | $11.00 | $1.04 | 10.6× |
| Blended · 50/50calculated | $15.00 | $1.37 | 10.9× |
| Blended · 80/20calculated | $9.00 | $0.878 | 10.3× |
| Blended · 20/80calculated | $21.00 | $1.86 | 11.3× |
| Job cost · 100K + 10Kcalculated | $0.750 | $0.077 | 9.8× |
| Job cost · 1M + 100Kcalculated | $7.50 | $0.769 | 9.8× |
| Context window | 1,000,000 | 64,000 | 15.6× |
Input and output rates are as published by each provider. Blended and job-cost rows are calculated comparison metrics, not published prices — how they are derived.
Benchmarks
These two models do not currently report scores on any of the same benchmark suites, so there is no like-for-like capability comparison to show. Rather than pad the page with one-sided numbers, the benchmark leaderboards list every score we do hold.
What each model is for
Claude Opus 5
Anthropic · Frontier
Anthropic positions Opus 5 as the model to reach for by default rather than to ration: it launched at $5/$25 per MTok, half the price of the previous Opus flagship, while keeping the 1M-token context window and multimodal text, image and file input. It sits below Fable 5 in the Claude ladder and above Sonnet 5.
- Frontier capability at half the previous Opus price
- 1M-token context
- Agentic coding and tool use
- Text, image & file input
DeepSeek-R1
DeepSeek · Reasoning
Open-weights reasoning model with chain-of-thought trained via RL. Comparable to o1 on math benchmarks at a fraction of the price.
- Open-weights reasoning
- Visible chain-of-thought
- Math & code
- Cheap
Frequently asked questions
Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 5 or DeepSeek-R1?
DeepSeek-R1 is the cheaper of the two by a wide margin: $1.04 per million tokens blended against $11.00, roughly 10.6× less. A single 100K-input, 10K-output job costs $0.077 on DeepSeek-R1 against $0.750 on Claude Opus 5. Blended cost weights input at 70% and output at 30%; price your own token split for an exact answer, since the cheaper model on a blended basis is not always cheaper for your workload.
Which has the larger context window, Claude Opus 5 or DeepSeek-R1?
Claude Opus 5 takes a 1,000,000-token context window against 64,000, giving 15.6× more room for long documents or whole-codebase work. The context window caps everything in a single request: prompt, retrieved documents, conversation history and the model’s own output all share it.
Can I compare Claude Opus 5 and DeepSeek-R1 on my own numbers?
Yes. Open both in the side-by-side comparison tool to see every field at once, or use the token calculator to price your actual prompt and monthly request volume against each model. Both are free and need no sign-up.
Price it for your own workload
Related matchups
Terms used on this page
Prices and scores are recomputed on every deploy from the catalogue. Prices checked 12 August 2026.