Model comparison 2026

Claude Haiku 5.5 vs DeepSeek V4 Flash

Claude Haiku 5.5
Anthropic · Budget · Proprietary
$0.22/1M · 1M ctx
DeepSeek V4 Flash
DeepSeek · Budget · Open weights
$0.42/1M · 1.0M ctx

Community vote

Pick a winner in each dimension. You can change your vote any time.

Output Quality
Correctness and depth of what it produces
Agentic Ability
Tool calls, instruction-following, and multi-step tasks
Speed
Tokens per second and time-to-first-token
Value for money
How much capability you get per dollar
Reliability
Consistent results: fewer refusals, loops and format breaks

Specs and pricing side by side

Spec
Haiku 5.5
DeepSeek V4 Flash
Maker
Anthropic
DeepSeek
Blended price / 1M
$0.22
$0.42
Input / output
$0.10 in · $0.50 out / 1M tokens
$0.05 in · $1.28 out / 1M tokens
Context window
1M
1.0M
Open weights
No
Yes
Tool use
Yes
Yes
Reasoning
Yes
Yes
Output Quality
9.1
8.2
Agentic Ability
9.0
8.1
Speed
9.6
9.0
Value for money
9.4
10.0
Reliability
9.3
8.9

Pricing and capabilities synced from the OpenRouter catalogue. Scores are editorial (0–10).

Verdict: Haiku 5.5 or DeepSeek V4 Flash?

Updated 2026-10-13

Choose Claude Haiku 5.5 if you want subagents, routing and high-volume steps that stay under 100K tokens per request. Choose DeepSeek V4 Flash if you want cheap, high-volume open-weight agent steps.

In our editorial scoring, Claude Haiku 5.5 leads in 4 of five dimensions (output quality, agentic ability, speed and reliability), while DeepSeek V4 Flash leads in 1. On price, Claude Haiku 5.5 runs about $0.22 per 1M tokens (blended) and is proprietary; DeepSeek V4 Flash is about $0.42 and open-weight.

Where Haiku 5.5 falls short
  • Prompts over 100K tokens cost 5x, on the whole request
  • New tokenizer counts about 30% more tokens than Haiku 4.5 for the same text
Full Haiku 5.5 breakdown →
Where DeepSeek V4 Flash falls short
  • Not for the hardest tasks
  • Quality below V4 Pro
Full DeepSeek V4 Flash breakdown →

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