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 Sonnet 4.6 if you want the everyday agent default — strong quality without the flagship price. Choose DeepSeek R1 (0528) if you want reasoning-heavy planning where cost matters.
In our editorial scoring, Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads in 4 of five dimensions (output quality, agentic ability, speed and reliability), while DeepSeek R1 (0528) leads in 1. On price, Claude Sonnet 4.6 runs about $6.60 per 1M tokens (blended) and is proprietary; DeepSeek R1 (0528) is about $0.99 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.