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DeepSeek R1 vs DeepSeek V3: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

DeepSeek V3 is significantly cheaper at $0.27/$1.10 per million tokens vs $0.55/$2.19. DeepSeek R1 is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1330 vs 1300. DeepSeek V3 is faster at 85 tokens/sec vs 45 tokens/sec. DeepSeek R1 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1310 vs 1280.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureDeepSeek R1DeepSeek V3
ProviderDeepSeekDeepSeek
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.550$0.270
Output Price / 1M tokens$2.19$1.10
Context Window128K128K
Max Output Tokens8,1928,192
Arena ELO1,3101,280
Coding ELO1,3301,300
TTFT (ms)1,800220
Tokens/sec4585
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingNoYes
VisionNoNo
When to Use DeepSeek R1

Choose DeepSeek R1 when you need: excellent reasoning at a fraction of o3's cost, open-source and self-hostable, top-tier math performance, very competitive with proprietary reasoning models. It excels at reasoning, math, coding, science tasks.

Strengths:

  • Excellent reasoning at a fraction of o3's cost
  • Open-source and self-hostable
  • Top-tier math performance
  • Very competitive with proprietary reasoning models

Best for:

reasoningmathcodingscience
When to Use DeepSeek V3

Choose DeepSeek V3 when you need: excellent coding performance for its price, open-source and self-hostable, very competitive benchmarks, extremely affordable. It excels at coding, general-purpose, cost-sensitive, open-source tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

Strengths:

  • Excellent coding performance for its price
  • Open-source and self-hostable
  • Very competitive benchmarks
  • Extremely affordable

Best for:

codinggeneral-purposecost-sensitiveopen-source

Frequently Asked Questions

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