In January 2025, a newly developed AI model - DeepSeek R1 captured wide attention in the AI market. Its outstanding performance quickly made it a focal point in the industry, attracting numerous users and professionals to use it.
However, we’ve also heard some different voices - people who used Claude claimed that DeepSeek R1 isn’t as good as Claude 3.5 Sonnet, especially when it comes to deep reasoning and creativity.
In this post, we’ll compare Deepseek R1 Vs Claude 3.5 Sonnet. The comparison will include each model’s main features, model types, text comprehension, strengths, weaknesses, and pricing.
Whether you’re a student, content creator, designer, developer, business leader, or AI enthusiast you’ll know which fits you better.
What Is DeepSeek?
In May 2023, Liang Wenfeng built a Chinese AI startup - DeepSeek. Until 2025, The company has developed two flagship open-source AI models - DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1. Each model is designed for different purposes.
DeepSeek R1 is a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model. With an estimated training cost of $5.5 million, DeepSeek R1 holds a total of 671 billion parameters and 37 billion activated parameters. Particularly, R1 can be used for content generation, chatbots, language translation, and other general AI-assisted tasks.
Based on V3’s design, DeepSeek-R1 became a new AI player in January 2025. With an estimated training cost of $5.58 million, it adopts the same AI core as that of V3. As an enhanced version of V3, R1 is better for complex reasoning and problem-solving. For example, it excels in mathematical problem-solving, coding assistance, scientific research, and other tasks that require deep logical analysis.
Remarkably, DeepSeek models have achieved excellent performance on AI benchmarks. For instance, DeepSeek-R1 has achieved 90.8% in MMLU, 91.6% in DROP, 49.2% in SWE-bench Verified, and 97.3% in MATH-500.
What Is Claude?
In 2021, the former OpenAI employees started a new company Anthropic, and built an AI chatbot, Claude. Compared with other AI chatbots, Claude is better at summarizing, collaborative writing, creative writing, and coding. Until now, it has released several major versions - Claude 1.0 in March 2023, Claude 2 in July 2023, and Claude 3 in March 2024.
The latest one, Claude 3.5, has around 500 billion parameters, which is almost 3 times more than Claude 2. It has a 200,000 token context window and can handle inputs of over 1 million tokens.
Claude is trained with Constitutional AI and RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback). Now, it’s available in 159 countries and has received much funding, involving $2 billion from Google and $4 billion from Amazon.
DeepSeek R1 vs Claude 3.5 Sonnet: A Full Comparison
In this section, we’ll see the differences between DeepSeek R1 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Accordingly, you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of these two advanced AI models.
Release Date
- DeepSeek R1: Release on January 20, 2025
- Claude 3.5 Sonnet: Released on June 20, 2024
Model Types
- DeepSeek R1: Apply an open-source model with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. It features 671 billion parameters in total. 37 billion of the parameters are active for each token. It’s better used to analyze large datasets in healthcare, finance, manufacturing, education, research and development, and other professional industries.
- Claude 3.5 Sonnet: It doesn’t use an open-source model. Instead, it’s known for its proprietary architecture that emphasizes safety and ethics. It’s better to use in writing long-form content, drafting regulatory standards and guidelines, assisting with coding, and scientific reasoning. Despite Claude 3.5 Sonnet, it has other model types such as Opus and Haiku.
Ease of Use
- DeepSeek R1: As an open-source model, it’s flexible for users to deploy options on the interface. Researchers, developers, and other users can modify the model in terms of their needs.
- Claude 3.5 Sonnet: The UI is natural and engaging, as it e emphasizes the ease of initiating conversations.
Text Comprehension
- DeepSeek R1: It has shown impressive capability to understand complex tasks. For example, if you ask it to solve a physics problem, it will show high performance in reasoning logically and explaining in a coherent manner.
- Claude 3.5 Sonnet: This structure is optimal for text comprehension, especially if you require an elaborate understanding of your text requirements. For the same physics question, it can provide a more accurate and appropriate response.
Performance
- DeepSeek R1: It achieves a 49.2% accuracy in HumanEval coding tasks. The model generates responses at a speed of up to 34 tokens per second. However, sometimes it may fall behind when comprehending subtleties compared to the more specialized models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
- Claude 3.5 Sonnet: It achieves a remarkable 93.7% accuracy in coding evaluations and 65.0% in reasoning evaluations. Particularly, it’s strong in tasks that require deep reasoning and complex problem-solving. While its generation speed may not match DeepSeek R1, it maintains a good balance between speed and accuracy.
Safety and Ethics
- DeepSeek R1: It mentions safety considerations in its documentation, but the details are more limited than the Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Although it emphasizes the importance of ethical use, it lacks specific mechanisms and evaluations to ensure safety and mitigate biases. Besides, in the Red Teaming report, DeepSeek R1 was 3.5 times more vulnerable than Claude-3-Opus.
- Claude 3.5 Sonnet: Claude 3.5 Sonnet has extensive safety evaluations and it’s classified as AI Safety Level 2 (ASL-2). It uses classifiers to detect potential misuse and refuse to engage in harmful content.
Limitations
- DeepSeek R1: Sometimes, DeepSeek R1 defaults to classical interpretations, which indicates that it is limited in understanding complex and nuanced topics. Besides, it always has a busy server error. This may limit its effectiveness in open dialogues. Additionally, there are ethical, legal, and political concerns about the data use of the models.
- Claude 3.5 Sonnet: Claude 3.5 Sonnet may not always match the speed of DeepSeek R1 in text generation. Besides, it lacks the flexibility and customization options with open-source models like DeepSeek R1. Users relying on Claude 3.5 Sonnet must adhere to Anthropic’s API guidelines and infrastructure.
Pricing
- DeepSeek R1: It’s a cost-effective choice. The input cost for DeepSeek R1 is $0.55 per million tokens, while the output cost is $2.19 per million tokens.
- Claude 3.5 Sonnet: It costs more than DeepSeek R1 as it is a premium model focusing on advanced and security features. The input cost is $3.00 per million tokens and the output cost is $15.00 per million tokens.
DeepSeek vs Claude: Which One Is Better?
As described above, both Claude and DeepSeek have strengths and weaknesses. DeepSeek is mainly designed for math equations, structured reasoning, and logical analysis so it would be better to be utilized in finance, science, and engineering.
Claude is more focused on ethics and safety. Also, it can analyze context and learn long sentences. Hence, it would be good to utilize it in research, documentation, and thorough discussions.
However, if you’re looking for a powerful and affordable AI tool, DeepSeek might be a better choice.
Bonus: Enjoy Free Unlimited Use of DeepSeek at HIX AI
If you don’t want to spend an extra budget on DeepSeek or Claude, you can freely enjoy the unlimited use of DeepSeek at HIX AI. As a professional all-in-one AI tool on the market, it allows you to freely access various latest AI models, including the latest DeepSeek R1 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
Also, if you are frequently suffering from a “DeepSeek server busy” error, you can use DeepSeek at HIX AI as well. No matter whether you’re a student, developer, content creator, or professional, you can make the best use of DeepSeek at HIX AI without restrictions or fees.
Conclusion
In summary, how to choose between DeepSeek and Claude depends on your budget and demands. DeepSeek shows strong performance in mathematical reasoning, and efficient coding capabilities at a more affordable price.
On the other hand, Claude excels in coding tasks with a larger context window of 200000 tokens. Both models have their strengths and limitations.
You can freely try both of them at HIX AI before determining which one to pay for.