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DeepSeek R1 vs Grok 3: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

DeepSeek R1 is significantly cheaper at $0.55/$2.19 per million tokens vs $3.00/$15.00. DeepSeek R1 is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1330 vs 1290. Grok 3 is faster at 80 tokens/sec vs 45 tokens/sec.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureDeepSeek R1Grok 3
ProviderDeepSeekxAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.550$3.00
Output Price / 1M tokens$2.19$15.00
Context Window128K128K
Max Output Tokens8,19216,384
Arena ELO1,3101,300
Coding ELO1,3301,290
TTFT (ms)1,800300
Tokens/sec4580
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 Grok 3

Choose Grok 3 when you need: strong benchmark performance, good reasoning capabilities, vision and multimodal support, fast for its capability tier. It excels at general-purpose, reasoning, coding tasks.

Strengths:

  • Strong benchmark performance
  • Good reasoning capabilities
  • Vision and multimodal support
  • Fast for its capability tier

Best for:

general-purposereasoningcoding

Frequently Asked Questions

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