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DeepSeek V3 vs o4-mini: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

DeepSeek V3 is significantly cheaper at $0.27/$1.10 per million tokens vs $1.10/$4.40. o4-mini is stronger for coding with a coding ELO of 1380 vs 1300. DeepSeek V3 is faster at 85 tokens/sec vs 60 tokens/sec. o4-mini ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1350 vs 1280. o4-mini offers a larger 200K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureDeepSeek V3o4-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 ELO1,2801,350
Coding ELO1,3001,380
TTFT (ms)2201,200
Tokens/sec8560
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 o4-mini

Choose o4-mini when you need: excellent reasoning and math capabilities, strong coding performance, affordable for a 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:

  • Excellent reasoning and math capabilities
  • Strong coding performance
  • Affordable for a reasoning model
  • Large output window

Best for:

reasoningmathcodingscience

Frequently Asked Questions

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