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DeepSeek R1 vs Gemini 2.5 Pro: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

DeepSeek R1 is significantly cheaper at $0.55/$2.19 per million tokens vs $1.25/$10.00. Gemini 2.5 Pro is faster at 70 tokens/sec vs 45 tokens/sec. Gemini 2.5 Pro ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1340 vs 1310. Gemini 2.5 Pro offers a larger 1049K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureDeepSeek R1Gemini 2.5 Pro
ProviderDeepSeekGoogle
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.550$1.25
Output Price / 1M tokens$2.19$10.00
Context Window128K1.048576M
Max Output Tokens8,19265,536
Arena ELO1,3101,340
Coding ELO1,3301,350
TTFT (ms)1,800400
Tokens/sec4570
MultimodalNoYes
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingNoYes
VisionNoYes
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. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

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 Gemini 2.5 Pro

Choose Gemini 2.5 Pro when you need: 1m token context window, excellent reasoning capabilities, strong coding performance, native multimodal support. It excels at coding, reasoning, long-context, multimodal tasks. Its 1049K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • 1M token context window
  • Excellent reasoning capabilities
  • Strong coding performance
  • Native multimodal support

Best for:

codingreasoninglong-contextmultimodal

Frequently Asked Questions

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