Pick a winner in each dimension — change your vote anytime.
Pricing and capabilities synced from the OpenRouter catalogue. Scores are editorial (0–10).
Choose Claude Fable 5 if you want the hardest autonomous coding and reasoning work, where the quality ceiling pays for itself. Choose DeepSeek V4 Flash if you want cheap, high-volume open-weight agent steps.
In our editorial scoring, Claude Fable 5 leads in 3 of five dimensions (output quality, agentic ability and reliability), while DeepSeek V4 Flash leads in 2. On price, Claude Fable 5 runs about $22 per 1M tokens (blended) and is proprietary; DeepSeek V4 Flash is about $0.13 and open-weight.
The model picks the moves; the agent runs the loop, the tools, and the guardrails. Once you've chosen a model, see which agent gets the most out of it.