DeepSeek V3 vs GPT-5.4
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •DeepSeek V3 is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (92 vs 72 on our capability index).
- •GPT-5.4 is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (84 vs 10).
- •DeepSeek V3 is open-weights (free to self-host); GPT-5.4 is paid API only.
- •DeepSeek V3 has a 128K tokens context window vs 1,050,000 tokens (128,000 max output) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| DeepSeek V3 | GPT-5.4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | OpenAI |
| Type | Open source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓128K tokens | 1,050,000 tokens (128,000 max output) |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓Free (self-host) | $2.50 |
| Output / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | $15.00 |
| Release date | 2024-12 | 2026-03 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | DeepSeek V3 | GPT-5.4 |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-training scale | ~15T tokens | - |
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 GPT-5.4 if...
- →Large-context tasks where GPT-5.5-level frontier reasoning is not required
- →Cost-conscious production workloads that still need strong capability
- →Migrating from GPT-5.4-based systems where behavior is already tuned