DeepSeek V3 vs Qwen 3
2026 - Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Qwen 3 is open-weights - free to self-host with no API costs. DeepSeek V3 requires paid API access.
Specs comparison
| DeepSeek V3 | Qwen 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | Alibaba (Qwen Team) |
| 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 | 2025-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | DeepSeek V3 | Qwen 3 |
|---|---|---|
| HumanEval | 90.2% | ~89% |
| MMLU | 88.5% | ~87% |
| 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
Qwen 3
- ✓Exceptional multilingual support (100+ languages)
- ✓Apache 2.0 license - fully open for commercial use
- ✓Multiple size variants from 0.6B to 235B MoE
- ✓Strong math and coding across models
- ✓Leading performance for Chinese language tasks
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 Qwen 3 if you need...
- →Multilingual applications
- →Self-hosted cost-sensitive deployments
- →Custom fine-tuning on domain-specific data
- →Asian market applications