DeepSeek V3 vs Mistral OCR 4
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •DeepSeek V3 is meaningfully stronger at coding (80 vs 5 on our capability index).
- •Mistral OCR 4 is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (90 vs 10).
- •DeepSeek V3 is open-weights (free to self-host); Mistral OCR 4 is paid API only.
Specs comparison
| DeepSeek V3 | Mistral OCR 4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | Mistral AI |
| Type | Open source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓128K tokens | Not announced |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓Free (self-host) | 4000 |
| Output / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | 4000 |
| Release date | 2024-12 | 2026-06 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | DeepSeek V3 | Mistral OCR 4 |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-training scale | ~15T tokens | - |
| OlmOCRBench | - | 85.20 |
| OmniDocBench | - | 93.07 |
| Human preference (head-to-head) | - | 72% win rate |
| Human evaluation (blind) | - | 72% |
| Human Evaluation (Blind Test) | - | 72% win rate |
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 Mistral OCR 4 if...
- →You need to convert PDFs, scans, or office docs into structured text/Markdown
- →You require high-accuracy multilingual document parsing at low cost
- →You need tables, equations, and layout preserved with confidence scores
- →You must keep documents in-house (self-hosted deployment)