DeepSeek V3 vs Qwen 3
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Qwen 3 is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (30 vs 10).
Specs comparison
| DeepSeek V3 | Qwen 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | Alibaba (Qwen Team) |
| Type | Open source | Open source |
| Context window | 128K tokens | 128K tokens (32K for 0.6B/1.7B/4B dense variants) |
| Input / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2024-12 | 2025-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | DeepSeek V3 | Qwen 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-training scale | ~15T tokens | - |
| Qwen3-235B-A22B | - | 235B total / 22B active |
| Qwen3-30B-A3B | - | 30B total / 3B active |
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 Qwen 3 if...
- →You need an open, self-hostable model with a permissive license
- →You want to toggle deep reasoning on or off per request
- →Multilingual applications
- →Efficient inference via MoE with few active parameters