ModelRefs / Claude 3 Opus vs DeepSeek V3
Claude 3 Opus vs DeepSeek V3
Claude 3 Opus vs DeepSeek V3: side-by-side benchmarks, pricing, context windows, coding ability and deployment. Pick the right model for your stack.
Overview
Claude 3 Opus: Claude 3 Opus is Anthropic's February 2024 frontier model and the most capable of the original Claude 3 family, accepting text and image input across a 200,000-token context window. The claude-3-opus-20240229 snapshot was deprecated on 30 June 2025 and retired on Anthropic-operated platforms on 5 January 2026, with Claude Opus 4.8 named as its replacement.
DeepSeek V3: DeepSeek V3 is DeepSeek's December 2024 open-weights Mixture-of-Experts model, activating 37 billion of 671 billion total parameters per token across a 128,000-token context window. It ships under the MIT licence with published weights and a technical report, and DeepSeek reports its own evaluation table for the text chat model under an 8,000-token output limit.
Context window: Claude 3 Opus accepts up to 200,000 tokens, DeepSeek V3 up to 128,000. Confirm the limit for your specific deployment channel before relying on it.
Claude 3 Opus vs DeepSeek V3 at a glance
| Attribute | Claude 3 Opus | DeepSeek V3 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | DeepSeek |
| Released | 2024-02-29 | 2024-12-26 |
| Context window | 200,000 tokens | 128,000 tokens |
| Input price | $15/M tokens | $0.27/M tokens |
| Output price | $75/M tokens | $1.1/M tokens |
| Licence | Proprietary | MIT |
| Self-hostable | No, hosted only | Yes, open weights |
| Modalities | text, vision | text |
Where they differ most
- Reasoning: Claude 3 Opus 38%, DeepSeek V3 72%. DeepSeek V3 leads on this dimension.
Capability scores are ModelRefs' own derived signals, not vendor claims or benchmark results. Validate against your own workload before relying on them.
Continue your research
Use these connected ModelRefs sections to compare alternatives, inspect implementation paths, and review the evidence and governance boundaries relevant to Claude 3 Opus vs DeepSeek V3.
Frequently asked questions
Which is better, Claude 3 Opus or DeepSeek V3?
Claude 3 Opus and DeepSeek V3 target different workloads — see the benchmark and pricing tables for a side-by-side answer.
Is Claude 3 Opus cheaper than DeepSeek V3?
Compare $0.0150 vs $0.00027 on this page.