DeepSeek V4 vs o1
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •DeepSeek V4 is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (88 vs 35 on our capability index).
- •o1 is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (60 vs 10).
- •DeepSeek V4 is open-weights (free to self-host); o1 is paid API only.
- •DeepSeek V4 has a 1M tokens context window vs 200,000 tokens (100,000 max output) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| DeepSeek V4 | o1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | OpenAI |
| Type | Open source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓1M tokens | 200,000 tokens (100,000 max output) |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓Free (self-host) | $15.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | Free (self-host) | $60.00 |
| Release date | 2026-04 | 2024-12 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | DeepSeek V4 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 80.6% | - |
| Math / STEM / Coding (open-model comparison) | Best among open models (per DeepSeek) | - |
| AIME 2024 | - | 74% |
| GPQA Diamond | - | 77.3% |
| Codeforces | - | ~89th percentile |
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 o1 if...
- →Hard, multi-step math, science, and logic problems that reward deliberate reasoning
- →Competitive programming and algorithmic problem solving
- →Existing o1-based pipelines already validated for reasoning tasks