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DeepSeek V3 vs GPT-4.1: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

DeepSeek V3 is significantly cheaper at $0.27/$1.10 per million tokens vs $2.00/$8.00. GPT-4.1 offers a larger 1048K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureDeepSeek V3GPT-4.1
ProviderDeepSeekOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.270$2.00
Output Price / 1M tokens$1.10$8.00
Context Window128K1.047576M
Max Output Tokens8,19232,768
Arena ELO1,2801,290
Coding ELO1,3001,320
TTFT (ms)220260
Tokens/sec8588
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 GPT-4.1

Choose GPT-4.1 when you need: 1m token context window, excellent coding performance, strong instruction following, competitive pricing for its capability. It excels at coding, long-context, agents, general-purpose tasks. Its 1048K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • 1M token context window
  • Excellent coding performance
  • Strong instruction following
  • Competitive pricing for its capability

Best for:

codinglong-contextagentsgeneral-purpose

Frequently Asked Questions

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