DeepSeek V3 vs Gemma 3
2026 - Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Gemma 3 is open-weights - free to self-host with no API costs. DeepSeek V3 requires paid API access.
Specs comparison
| DeepSeek V3 | Gemma 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | Google DeepMind |
| Type | Open source | Open source |
| Context window | 128K | 128K |
| Input / 1M tokens | $0.27 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $1.10 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2024-12 | 2025-03 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | DeepSeek V3 | Gemma 3 |
|---|---|---|
| HumanEval | 90.2% | - |
| MMLU | 88.5% | ~76% |
| Aider Polyglot | 55.0% | - |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts.
Strengths
DeepSeek V3
- ✓Near-GPT-4o quality at a fraction of the price
- ✓Open weights - self-host or fine-tune freely
- ✓Efficient MoE architecture reduces inference cost
- ✓Strong coding (Aider polyglot, HumanEval)
- ✓Good instruction following and structured output
Gemma 3
- ✓Runs on consumer hardware (4B and 12B variants)
- ✓Multimodal input support
- ✓Strong benchmark performance relative to size
- ✓Tight Keras and JAX integration
- ✓Good instruction following out of the box
Which should you choose?
Choose DeepSeek V3 if you need...
- →Cost-sensitive high-volume inference
- →Self-hosted deployments
- →Fine-tuning for specialized domains
- →Coding assistants
Choose Gemma 3 if you need...
- →On-device and edge inference
- →Low-resource environments
- →Prototyping with free Google AI Studio access
- →Researchers benchmarking small models