DeepSeek V4 Flash vs Qwen 3
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •DeepSeek V4 Flash is meaningfully stronger at long context (95 vs 80 on our capability index).
- •Qwen 3 is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (30 vs 10).
- •DeepSeek V4 Flash has a 1M tokens context window vs 128K tokens (32K for 0.6B/1.7B/4B dense variants) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| DeepSeek V4 Flash | Qwen 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | Alibaba (Qwen Team) |
| Type | Open source | Open source |
| Context window | ✓1M 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 | 2026-04 | 2025-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | DeepSeek V4 Flash | Qwen 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Reasoning (vs V4 Pro) | Closely approaches V4 Pro | - |
| 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 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 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