Claude vs DeepSeek

• Your work starts with files
• You need team controls
• You want Claude Code in the same subscription
• You want the cheapest short-prompt API calls

• You build on an API and watch cost per token
• You need long outputs
• You want to self-host
• You can schedule batch work

Claude is better for most people and teams: it has clear paid plans (Pro is USD 20 a month), Claude Code and no training by default on Team and Enterprise. Choose DeepSeek for open weights, 384K token API outputs or cheap mid-tier tokens, but its privacy policy stores personal data in the People's Republic of China.

Choose Claude if

• Your work starts with files. Anthropic's upload help article allows 500MB per file and 20 files per chat, and Claude reads charts in PDFs of up to 100 pages.
• You need team controls. Team plans run from 2 to 150 seats with SSO and central billing, and Enterprise adds SCIM, audit logs and custom data retention.
• You want Claude Code in the same subscription. It is included on every paid plan and shares the plan's usage pool.
• You want the cheapest short-prompt API calls. Haiku 5.5 is the lowest list price in this comparison up to 100,000-token prompts.

Choose DeepSeek if

• You build on an API and watch cost per token. V4 Pro output costs less than half of Sonnet 5.5's, and off-peak rates halve it again.
• You need long outputs. Both DeepSeek models allow 384K output tokens.
• You want to self-host. The V4.1 Flash weights ship under the MIT License.
• You can schedule batch work. Weekends and most weekday hours bill at the off-peak rate.

On the mid tier, yes. DeepSeek V4 Pro lists USD 1.32 per 1M cache-miss input tokens and USD 3.96 per 1M output tokens at peak, and half that off-peak. Claude Sonnet 5.5 lists USD 2 and USD 10, and Claude Opus 5.5 lists USD 4 and USD 20, so V4 Pro output at peak costs about 40% of Sonnet's rate and 20% of Opus's. DeepSeek's off-peak window covers every hour outside 01:00 to 04:00 and 06:00 to 10:00 UTC on weekdays, including all weekend hours.

At the bottom of the range, Claude is cheaper on short prompts. Claude Haiku 5.5 lists USD 0.10 input and USD 0.50 output for prompts up to 100,000 tokens, below DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at USD 0.15 and USD 0.60 even off-peak. Above 100,000 tokens Haiku jumps to USD 0.50 and USD 2.50, and Flash becomes the cheaper of the two. Caching shifts the math again: a Flash cache hit costs USD 0.006 per 1M tokens at peak, and a Haiku cache read USD 0.01.

DeepSeek's pricing page listed V4 Pro output at USD 3.96 per 1M tokens at peak on 23 October 2026, against USD 10 for Claude Sonnet 5.5 on Anthropic's pricing page. Our guide to how AI API pricing works explains input, output and caching charges.

For public or low-risk material, yes; for client, health or regulated data, read the storage terms first. DeepSeek's privacy policy, last updated 10 February 2026, names Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd. as data controller and says: "we directly collect, process and store your Personal Data in People's Republic of China." It says prompts, uploaded files and chat history are used to train and improve its models, and that chat data is kept as long as you have an account. The policy also tells users not to submit sensitive personal data.

The DeepSeek Terms of Use, updated 27 March 2026, let you opt out of training by turning off "Improve the model for everyone", and put disputes under the law of mainland China.

Anthropic's consumer terms update lets Free, Pro and Max users choose whether chats train models. If you allow it, Anthropic keeps that data for five years; if not, the 30-day retention period applies. Those terms do not cover Team, Enterprise or API use.

If your rules restrict where data is processed, read DeepSeek's storage clause before the first prompt. Self-hosting the open weights keeps prompts off DeepSeek's servers.

Yes, if you have serious hardware. DeepSeek publishes the DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash model card and weights on Hugging Face under the MIT License. The card describes a multimodal mixture-of-experts model with 552B backbone parameters and up to one million tokens of context. Traffic to weights you host never reaches DeepSeek's service, so the China storage clause does not apply to it. Anthropic publishes no Claude weights; you reach Claude through its apps, its API and cloud platforms. Our guide to open-weight and closed models covers the tradeoffs.

Yes. DeepSeek's Claude Code integration guide points Claude Code at DeepSeek's Anthropic-format endpoint, api.deepseek.com/anthropic, with a DeepSeek API key, and maps the Opus, Sonnet and Haiku slots to deepseek-flash. You then pay DeepSeek's token rates rather than drawing on a Claude plan. Calls to DeepSeek's Search and Fetch tools through Claude Code are free until billing starts at 00:00 Beijing time on 1 November 2026, then cost USD 0.75 per 1,000 successful requests. For a packaged comparison of coding tools, see Cursor vs Claude Code.

Both offer 1M tokens of context on their current API models, and both accept the Anthropic API format: DeepSeek lists an Anthropic-format base URL alongside its OpenAI-format one. Both have a free chat app on web and mobile, and both let consumer users stop their chats training future models.

Claude

• Best for: sustained writing, document analysis and coding inside one subscription.
• Main limitation: every plan meters use on a rolling five-hour window, paid plans add weekly limits, and Anthropic publishes no fixed message counts. Max output is 128K tokens per response.
• Price or plan limits (checked 23 October 2026): Free USD 0, Pro USD 20 monthly or USD 17 a month billed annually, Max from USD 100 a month; API from USD 0.10 / 0.50 (Haiku 5.5) to USD 10 / 50 (Fable 5.1) per 1M tokens.

DeepSeek

• Best for: low-cost API work, long generated outputs and self-hosting.
• Main limitation: data is stored in China, consumer chats train models by default, and DeepSeek publishes no consumer plans, file limits or team plan. V4 Pro does not accept images.
• Price or plan limits (checked 23 October 2026): V4.1 Flash USD 0.30 / 1.20 and V4 Pro USD 1.32 / 3.96 per 1M tokens at peak, half off-peak; 2,500 and 500 concurrent requests per account.

A confident answer with a citation is still a claim to check.

In the Tow Center for Digital Journalism's 2025 test of eight AI search tools, DeepSeek Search misattributed the source of the excerpts 115 out of 200 times. Claude was not among the tools tested. The study ran in February 2025 on a narrow task, news attribution, and both products have changed since.

1. Pick three tasks you repeat: a long-document summary, a coding fix and a structured extraction.
2. Strip anything sensitive before it goes to DeepSeek's hosted service, or test on self-hosted weights.
3. Run the same prompts on Claude Sonnet 5.5 and DeepSeek V4 Pro, then on Haiku 5.5 and V4.1 Flash.
4. Log cost per completed task, not per token, and note whether the DeepSeek call ran at peak or off-peak.
5. Record the model version in each response, because DeepSeek's deepseek-flash name now serves DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017.

See also our Claude review, DeepSeek provider profile, Anthropic provider profile, ChatGPT compared with DeepSeek and the model profiles for DeepSeek V4 Pro and Claude Haiku 5.5. Before uploading client files to either, run through our AI tool privacy checklist.