Claude Haiku 4.5 vs DeepSeek V3
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Haiku 4.5 is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (74 vs 10 on our capability index).
- •DeepSeek V3 is meaningfully stronger at math (78 vs 68).
- •DeepSeek V3 is open-weights (free to self-host); Claude Haiku 4.5 is paid API only.
Specs comparison
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | DeepSeek V3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | DeepSeek |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | ✓200K | 128K tokens |
| Input / 1M tokens | $1.00 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $5.00 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2025-10 | 2024-12 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Haiku 4.5 | DeepSeek V3 |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 73.3% | - |
| GPQA | 64.6% | - |
| MMLU Pro | 80.0% | - |
| Pre-training scale | - | ~15T tokens |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose Claude Haiku 4.5 if...
- →You need high throughput and low latency at minimal cost
- →You are fanning out many parallel sub-agents or worker calls
- →You want solid coding/computer-use quality without Opus/Sonnet pricing
- →Your task fits comfortably within a 200K context window
Choose DeepSeek V3 if...
- →You want a proven, stable open model with broad ecosystem support
- →You need to self-host or fine-tune without licensing friction
- →Cost is critical and you don't need V4's 1M context or top scores
- →You want reproducible open-weight behavior pinned to a known version