DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 vs. Claude Haiku 5.5: More Accurate at a Fraction of the Price
The New Stack, Thursday, October 22nd, 2026
A hands-on test of two low-cost models on coding, data Q&A and extraction finds DeepSeek slightly more accurate and cheaper.
Jessica Wachtel ran DeepSeek's open-weight V4.1-Flash-1017 and Anthropic's Claude Haiku 5.5 through OpenRouter on three graded tests based on each vendor's claimed strengths.
DeepSeek scored 6 of 6 on a bug-fixing task to Haiku's 5, both scored 20 of 20 on a data Q&A test with trap questions, and on extracting 1,600 fields DeepSeek got all of them right and Haiku 1,596.
Haiku was faster with fewer turns, while DeepSeek usually cost less, largely because of automatic input caching.
The author notes Haiku's opt-in caching was off, which could change the cost comparison.