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

Verdict

Llama 4 Scout is significantly cheaper at $0.10/$0.30 per million tokens vs $0.55/$2.19. DeepSeek R1 is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1330 vs 1230. Llama 4 Scout is faster at 110 tokens/sec vs 45 tokens/sec. DeepSeek R1 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1310 vs 1250. Llama 4 Scout offers a larger 10486K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureDeepSeek R1Llama 4 Scout
ProviderDeepSeekMeta
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.550$0.100
Output Price / 1M tokens$2.19$0.300
Context Window128K10.48576M
Max Output Tokens8,19232,768
Arena ELO1,3101,250
Coding ELO1,3301,230
TTFT (ms)1,800200
Tokens/sec45110
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 Scout

Choose Llama 4 Scout when you need: 10m token context window, very affordable, open-source and self-hostable, good general performance. It excels at long-context, chatbots, cost-sensitive, open-source tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two. Its 10486K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • 10M token context window
  • Very affordable
  • Open-source and self-hostable
  • Good general performance

Best for:

long-contextchatbotscost-sensitiveopen-source

Frequently Asked Questions

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