DeepSeek V3 vs GPT-5
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •GPT-5 is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (83 vs 10).
- •DeepSeek V3 is open-weights (free to self-host); GPT-5 is paid API only.
- •DeepSeek V3 has a 128K tokens context window vs 400,000 tokens (128,000 max output) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| DeepSeek V3 | GPT-5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | OpenAI |
| Type | Open source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓128K tokens | 400,000 tokens (128,000 max output) |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓Free (self-host) | $1.25 |
| Output / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | $10.00 |
| Release date | 2024-12 | 2025-08 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | DeepSeek V3 | GPT-5 |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-training scale | ~15T tokens | - |
| SWE-bench Verified | - | 74.9% |
| AIME 2025 | - | 94.6% |
| GPQA (GPT-5 pro) | - | 88.4% |
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 if...
- →You want strong reasoning at the lowest frontier-model price
- →Existing GPT-5-based systems that are already tuned and validated
- →General coding, math, and reasoning workloads on a budget