DeepSeek V3 vs Gemini 3.5
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemini 3.5 is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (90 vs 10).
- •DeepSeek V3 is open-weights (free to self-host); Gemini 3.5 is paid API only.
- •DeepSeek V3 has a 128K tokens context window vs 1,048,576 tokens (Gemini 3.5 Flash; Pro variant not yet released) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| DeepSeek V3 | Gemini 3.5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | Google DeepMind |
| Type | Open source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓128K tokens | 1,048,576 tokens (Gemini 3.5 Flash; Pro variant not yet released) |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓Free (self-host) | $1.50 |
| Output / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | $9.00 |
| Release date | 2024-12 | 2026-05 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | DeepSeek V3 | Gemini 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-training scale | ~15T tokens | - |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (coding) | - | 76.2% |
| MCP Atlas (tool use) | - | 83.6% |
| CharXiv Reasoning (multimodal) | - | 84.2% |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose DeepSeek V3 if...
- →You want a proven, stable open model with broad ecosystem support
- →You need to self-host or fine-tune without licensing friction
- →Cost is critical and you don't need V4's 1M context or top scores
- →You want reproducible open-weight behavior pinned to a known version
Choose Gemini 3.5 if...
- →You need frontier agent/coding performance without frontier prices
- →Building autonomous agents that make many tool calls
- →High-throughput production workloads that were previously too costly on a Pro model
- →You want a strong default multimodal model with a 1M-token context window