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DeepSeek R1 vs GPT-4.1: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

DeepSeek R1 is significantly cheaper at $0.55/$2.19 per million tokens vs $2.00/$8.00. GPT-4.1 is faster at 88 tokens/sec vs 45 tokens/sec. DeepSeek R1 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1310 vs 1290. GPT-4.1 offers a larger 1048K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureDeepSeek R1GPT-4.1
ProviderDeepSeekOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.550$2.00
Output Price / 1M tokens$2.19$8.00
Context Window128K1.047576M
Max Output Tokens8,19232,768
Arena ELO1,3101,290
Coding ELO1,3301,320
TTFT (ms)1,800260
Tokens/sec4588
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 GPT-4.1

Choose GPT-4.1 when you need: 1m token context window, excellent coding performance, strong instruction following, competitive pricing for its capability. It excels at coding, long-context, agents, general-purpose tasks. Its 1048K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • 1M token context window
  • Excellent coding performance
  • Strong instruction following
  • Competitive pricing for its capability

Best for:

codinglong-contextagentsgeneral-purpose

Frequently Asked Questions

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