DeepSeek V4 vs GPT-5
2026 - Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •DeepSeek V4 is open-weights - free to self-host with no API costs. GPT-5 requires paid API access.
- •DeepSeek V4 is open-source: fine-tune it, self-host it, or use any inference provider. GPT-5 is closed-source.
Specs comparison
| DeepSeek V4 | GPT-5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | OpenAI |
| Type | Open source | Closed source |
| Context window | 128K | 128K |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓Free (self-host) | $10.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | $30.00 |
| Release date | 2025-12 | 2025-06 |
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
GPT-5
- ✓Strong general-purpose reasoning
- ✓Excellent multimodal understanding
- ✓Broad domain knowledge
- ✓Consistent instruction following
- ✓Widely supported by third-party tools
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 GPT-5 if you need...
- →General-purpose API integrations
- →Multimodal applications
- →Complex reasoning tasks
- →Enterprise deployments