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DeepSeek R1 vs o4-mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

DeepSeek R1 is significantly cheaper at $0.55/$2.19 per million tokens vs $1.10/$4.40. o4-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1380 vs 1330. o4-mini is faster at 60 tokens/sec vs 45 tokens/sec. o4-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1350 vs 1310. o4-mini offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureDeepSeek R1o4-mini
ProviderDeepSeekOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.550$1.10
Output Price / 1M tokens$2.19$4.40
Context Window128K200K
Max Output Tokens8,192100,000
Arena ELO1,3101,350
Coding ELO1,3301,380
TTFT (ms)1,8001,200
Tokens/sec4560
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 o4-mini

Choose o4-mini when you need: excellent reasoning and math capabilities, strong coding performance, affordable for a reasoning model, large output window. It excels at reasoning, math, coding, science tasks. Its 200K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • Excellent reasoning and math capabilities
  • Strong coding performance
  • Affordable for a reasoning model
  • Large output window

Best for:

reasoningmathcodingscience

Frequently Asked Questions

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