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DeepSeek R1 vs Llama 4 Maverick: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Llama 4 Maverick is significantly cheaper at $0.20/$0.60 per million tokens vs $0.55/$2.19. DeepSeek R1 is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1330 vs 1280. Llama 4 Maverick is faster at 90 tokens/sec vs 45 tokens/sec. DeepSeek R1 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1310 vs 1290. Llama 4 Maverick offers a larger 1049K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureDeepSeek R1Llama 4 Maverick
ProviderDeepSeekMeta
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.550$0.200
Output Price / 1M tokens$2.19$0.600
Context Window128K1.048576M
Max Output Tokens8,19232,768
Arena ELO1,3101,290
Coding ELO1,3301,280
TTFT (ms)1,800250
Tokens/sec4590
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.

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 Llama 4 Maverick

Choose Llama 4 Maverick when you need: open-source model with strong performance, very affordable via hosted providers, 1m context window, mixture-of-experts architecture. It excels at chatbots, coding, general-purpose, open-source tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two. Its 1049K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • Open-source model with strong performance
  • Very affordable via hosted providers
  • 1M context window
  • Mixture-of-experts architecture

Best for:

chatbotscodinggeneral-purposeopen-source

Frequently Asked Questions

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