DeepSeek-R1 vs Gemini 2.5 Flash: Detailed Comparison
Choosing between DeepSeek-R1 (DeepSeek) and
Gemini 2.5 Flash (Google) comes down to three things:
per-token pricing, context window, and which capability matters most for your workload.
DeepSeek-R1 costs $0.55/M input vs
$0.30/M for Gemini 2.5 Flash;
context windows are 128K vs
1.0M tokens. Detailed breakdown below.
Side-by-side specs
| Spec | DeepSeek-R1 | Gemini 2.5 Flash |
|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | Google |
|---|
| Released | 2025-01-20 | 2025-04-09 |
|---|
| Input price |
$0.55/M |
$0.30/M |
| Output price |
$2.19/M |
$2.50/M |
| Cached input |
$0.1400/M |
$0.0750/M |
| Context window |
128K |
1.0M |
| Max output |
32K |
66K |
| Modalities |
text |
text image audio video |
| Tokenizer |
deepseek |
gemini |
Capability matrix
| Capability | DeepSeek-R1 | Gemini 2.5 Flash |
|---|
| json mode |
Yes |
Yes |
| streaming |
Yes |
Yes |
| reasoning |
Yes |
No |
| function calling |
No |
Yes |
| vision |
No |
Yes |
| audio |
No |
Yes |
| video |
No |
Yes |
Benchmark comparison
Higher is better for all benchmarks shown.
Per-call cost on typical workloads
| Workload (in/out tokens) | DeepSeek-R1 | Gemini 2.5 Flash | Cheaper by |
|---|
| Standard chat (1K / 500) |
$0.001645 |
$0.001550 |
Gemini 2.5 Flash by $0.000095 |
| RAG (4K / 500) |
$0.003295 |
$0.002450 |
Gemini 2.5 Flash by $0.000845 |
| Long doc (20K / 1K) |
$0.013190 |
$0.008500 |
Gemini 2.5 Flash by $0.004690 |
| Very long context (100K / 2K) |
$0.058285 |
$0.033750 |
Gemini 2.5 Flash by $0.024535 |
When to choose DeepSeek-R1 over Gemini 2.5 Flash
- Supports reasoning — Gemini 2.5 Flash does not.
When to choose Gemini 2.5 Flash over DeepSeek-R1
- Per-token input cost is 45% lower than DeepSeek-R1.
- Larger context window (1.0M vs 128K).
- Supports function calling — DeepSeek-R1 does not.
- Supports vision — DeepSeek-R1 does not.
- Supports audio — DeepSeek-R1 does not.
- Supports video — DeepSeek-R1 does not.
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