DeepSeek V4 vs Gemini 3.5
2026 - Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •DeepSeek V4 is open-weights - free to self-host with no API costs. Gemini 3.5 requires paid API access.
- •Gemini 3.5 has a 1M context window - 8x larger than DeepSeek V4's 128K. Better for long documents and large codebases.
- •DeepSeek V4 is open-source: fine-tune it, self-host it, or use any inference provider. Gemini 3.5 is closed-source.
Specs comparison
| DeepSeek V4 | Gemini 3.5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | Google DeepMind |
| Type | Open source | Closed source |
| Context window | 128K | ✓1M |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓Free (self-host) | TBA |
| Output / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | TBA |
| Release date | 2025-12 | 2026-05 |
Strengths
DeepSeek V4
- ✓Mixture-of-Experts architecture - high capability, low activation cost
- ✓Open-source weights freely available
- ✓Strong coding and reasoning benchmarks
- ✓Flash variant offers low-latency inference
- ✓Significantly cheaper to run than US frontier models
Gemini 3.5
- ✓Action-first architecture for agentic and multi-step workflows
- ✓1M token context window - largest in class
- ✓Powers Google Antigravity CLI for terminal-native coding
- ✓Native Workspace integration with autonomous task execution
- ✓Companion Gemini Omni handles anything-to-anything multimodal generation
Which should you choose?
Choose DeepSeek V4 if you need...
- →Self-hosted deployments needing frontier performance
- →Cost-sensitive high-volume inference
- →Coding and technical tasks
- →Researchers studying MoE architectures
Choose Gemini 3.5 if you need...
- →Agentic workflows requiring multi-step tool use
- →Large codebase comprehension and editing
- →Google Workspace automation
- →Long document and multimodal analysis