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DeepSeek V3 vs Gemini 2.5 Pro: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

DeepSeek V3 is significantly cheaper at $0.27/$1.10 per million tokens vs $1.25/$10.00. Gemini 2.5 Pro is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1350 vs 1300. Gemini 2.5 Pro ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1340 vs 1280. Gemini 2.5 Pro offers a larger 1049K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureDeepSeek V3Gemini 2.5 Pro
ProviderDeepSeekGoogle
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.270$1.25
Output Price / 1M tokens$1.10$10.00
Context Window128K1.048576M
Max Output Tokens8,19265,536
Arena ELO1,2801,340
Coding ELO1,3001,350
TTFT (ms)220400
Tokens/sec8570
MultimodalNoYes
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionNoYes
When to Use DeepSeek V3

Choose DeepSeek V3 when you need: excellent coding performance for its price, open-source and self-hostable, very competitive benchmarks, extremely affordable. It excels at coding, general-purpose, cost-sensitive, open-source tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

Strengths:

  • Excellent coding performance for its price
  • Open-source and self-hostable
  • Very competitive benchmarks
  • Extremely affordable

Best for:

codinggeneral-purposecost-sensitiveopen-source
When to Use Gemini 2.5 Pro

Choose Gemini 2.5 Pro when you need: 1m token context window, excellent reasoning capabilities, strong coding performance, native multimodal support. It excels at coding, reasoning, long-context, multimodal tasks. Its 1049K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • 1M token context window
  • Excellent reasoning capabilities
  • Strong coding performance
  • Native multimodal support

Best for:

codingreasoninglong-contextmultimodal

Frequently Asked Questions

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