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DeepSeek V3 vs GPT-4o: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

DeepSeek V3 is significantly cheaper at $0.27/$1.10 per million tokens vs $2.50/$10.00. DeepSeek V3 is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1300 vs 1265. DeepSeek V3 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1280 vs 1260.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureDeepSeek V3GPT-4o
ProviderDeepSeekOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.270$2.50
Output Price / 1M tokens$1.10$10.00
Context Window128K128K
Max Output Tokens8,19216,384
Arena ELO1,2801,260
Coding ELO1,3001,265
TTFT (ms)220230
Tokens/sec8595
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-4o

Choose GPT-4o when you need: fast response times, strong multimodal capabilities, code execution support. It excels at general-purpose, multimodal, function-calling tasks.

Strengths:

  • Fast response times
  • Strong multimodal capabilities
  • Code execution support

Best for:

general-purposemultimodalfunction-calling

Frequently Asked Questions

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