DeepSeek V3 vs Llama 4 Scout: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Llama 4 Scout is significantly cheaper at $0.10/$0.30 per million tokens vs $0.27/$1.10. DeepSeek V3 is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1300 vs 1230. DeepSeek V3 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1280 vs 1250. Llama 4 Scout offers a larger 10486K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureDeepSeek V3Llama 4 Scout
ProviderDeepSeekMeta
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.270$0.100
Output Price / 1M tokens$1.10$0.300
Context Window128K10.48576M
Max Output Tokens8,19232,768
Arena ELO1,2801,250
Coding ELO1,3001,230
TTFT (ms)220200
Tokens/sec85110
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.

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 Llama 4 Scout

Choose Llama 4 Scout when you need: 10m token context window, very affordable, open-source and self-hostable, good general performance. It excels at long-context, chatbots, cost-sensitive, open-source tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two. Its 10486K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • 10M token context window
  • Very affordable
  • Open-source and self-hostable
  • Good general performance

Best for:

long-contextchatbotscost-sensitiveopen-source

Frequently Asked Questions

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