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DeepSeek V3 vs Grok 3: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

DeepSeek V3 is significantly cheaper at $0.27/$1.10 per million tokens vs $3.00/$15.00. Grok 3 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1300 vs 1280.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureDeepSeek V3Grok 3
ProviderDeepSeekxAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.270$3.00
Output Price / 1M tokens$1.10$15.00
Context Window128K128K
Max Output Tokens8,19216,384
Arena ELO1,2801,300
Coding ELO1,3001,290
TTFT (ms)220300
Tokens/sec8580
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 Grok 3

Choose Grok 3 when you need: strong benchmark performance, good reasoning capabilities, vision and multimodal support, fast for its capability tier. It excels at general-purpose, reasoning, coding tasks.

Strengths:

  • Strong benchmark performance
  • Good reasoning capabilities
  • Vision and multimodal support
  • Fast for its capability tier

Best for:

general-purposereasoningcoding

Frequently Asked Questions

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