DeepSeek V4 Flash vs GPT-5.4
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •DeepSeek V4 Flash is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (95 vs 72 on our capability index).
- •GPT-5.4 is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (84 vs 10).
- •DeepSeek V4 Flash is open-weights (free to self-host); GPT-5.4 is paid API only.
- •DeepSeek V4 Flash has a 1M tokens context window vs 1,050,000 tokens (128,000 max output) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| DeepSeek V4 Flash | GPT-5.4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | OpenAI |
| Type | Open source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓1M 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 | 2026-04 | 2026-03 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | DeepSeek V4 Flash | GPT-5.4 |
|---|---|---|
| Reasoning (vs V4 Pro) | Closely approaches V4 Pro | - |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose DeepSeek V4 Flash if...
- →You want most of V4 Pro's capability at a lower price and higher throughput
- →You need long context but on a tighter compute or cost budget
- →You are serving high request volumes where per-token cost dominates
- →You want an open model small enough to self-host on modest multi-GPU setups
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