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DeepSeek V3 vs o3-mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

DeepSeek V3 is significantly cheaper at $0.27/$1.10 per million tokens vs $1.10/$4.40. o3-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1340 vs 1300. DeepSeek V3 is faster at 85 tokens/sec vs 55 tokens/sec. o3-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1310 vs 1280. o3-mini offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureDeepSeek V3o3-mini
ProviderDeepSeekOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.270$1.10
Output Price / 1M tokens$1.10$4.40
Context Window128K200K
Max Output Tokens8,192100,000
Arena ELO1,2801,310
Coding ELO1,3001,340
TTFT (ms)2201,500
Tokens/sec8555
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionNoNo
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 o3-mini

Choose o3-mini when you need: strong mathematical reasoning, good coding performance, affordable reasoning model, large output window. It excels at reasoning, math, coding, science tasks. Its 200K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • Strong mathematical reasoning
  • Good coding performance
  • Affordable reasoning model
  • Large output window

Best for:

reasoningmathcodingscience

Frequently Asked Questions

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