Head-to-head comparison across 3benchmark categories. Overall scores shown here use BenchLM's provisional ranking lane.
Claude Sonnet 4.5
66
DeepSeek V4 Pro
71
Verified leaderboard positions: Claude Sonnet 4.5 unranked · DeepSeek V4 Pro #22
Pick DeepSeek V4 Pro if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude Sonnet 4.5 only becomes the better choice if knowledge is the priority.
Agentic
+3.8 difference
Coding
+18.4 difference
Knowledge
+34.0 difference
Claude Sonnet 4.5
DeepSeek V4 Pro
$3 / $15
$1.74 / $3.48
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
200K
1M
Pick DeepSeek V4 Pro if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude Sonnet 4.5 only becomes the better choice if knowledge is the priority.
DeepSeek V4 Pro is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 71 to 66. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
DeepSeek V4 Pro's sharpest advantage is in agentic, where it averages 59.1 against 55.3. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is GPQA, 83.4% to 72.9%. Claude Sonnet 4.5 does hit back in knowledge, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 is also the more expensive model on tokens at $3.00 input / $15.00 output per 1M tokens, versus $1.74 input / $3.48 output per 1M tokens for DeepSeek V4 Pro. That is roughly 4.3x on output cost alone. DeepSeek V4 Pro gives you the larger context window at 1M, compared with 200K for Claude Sonnet 4.5.
DeepSeek V4 Pro is ahead on BenchLM's provisional leaderboard, 71 to 66. The biggest single separator in this matchup is GPQA, where the scores are 83.4% and 72.9%.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 83.4 versus 49.4. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 77.2 versus 58.8. Inside this category, SWE-bench Verified is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
DeepSeek V4 Pro has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 59.1 versus 55.3. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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