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DeepSeek R1 vs GPT-4o: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

DeepSeek R1 is significantly cheaper at $0.55/$2.19 per million tokens vs $2.50/$10.00. DeepSeek R1 is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1330 vs 1265. GPT-4o is faster at 95 tokens/sec vs 45 tokens/sec. DeepSeek R1 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1310 vs 1260.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureDeepSeek R1GPT-4o
ProviderDeepSeekOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.550$2.50
Output Price / 1M tokens$2.19$10.00
Context Window128K128K
Max Output Tokens8,19216,384
Arena ELO1,3101,260
Coding ELO1,3301,265
TTFT (ms)1,800230
Tokens/sec4595
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-4o

Choose GPT-4o when you need: fast response times, strong multimodal capabilities, code execution support. It excels at general-purpose, multimodal, function-calling tasks.

Strengths:

  • Fast response times
  • Strong multimodal capabilities
  • Code execution support

Best for:

general-purposemultimodalfunction-calling

Frequently Asked Questions

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