DeepSeek V4 vs GPT-5.4
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •DeepSeek V4 is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (88 vs 72 on our capability index).
- •GPT-5.4 is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (84 vs 10).
- •DeepSeek V4 is open-weights (free to self-host); GPT-5.4 is paid API only.
- •DeepSeek V4 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 | 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 | GPT-5.4 |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 80.6% | - |
| Math / STEM / Coding (open-model comparison) | Best among open models (per DeepSeek) | - |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose DeepSeek V4 if...
- →You need a frontier-class open model you can self-host for data control
- →Your workload involves very long documents, codebases, or agent trajectories (up to 1M tokens)
- →You want top-tier agentic coding at a fraction of closed-model cost
- →You need to fine-tune or customize a strong base model
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