DeepSeek-R1 vs o3: Detailed Comparison
Choosing between DeepSeek-R1 (DeepSeek) and
o3 (OpenAI) 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
$2.00/M for o3;
context windows are 128K vs
200K tokens. Detailed breakdown below.
Side-by-side specs
| Spec | DeepSeek-R1 | o3 |
|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | OpenAI |
|---|
| Released | 2025-01-20 | 2025-04-16 |
|---|
| Input price |
$0.55/M |
$2.00/M |
| Output price |
$2.19/M |
$8.00/M |
| Cached input |
$0.1400/M |
$0.5000/M |
| Context window |
128K |
200K |
| Max output |
32K |
100K |
| Modalities |
text |
text image |
| Tokenizer |
deepseek |
o200k_base |
Capability matrix
| Capability | DeepSeek-R1 | o3 |
|---|
| json mode |
Yes |
Yes |
| streaming |
Yes |
No |
| reasoning |
Yes |
Yes |
| function calling |
No |
Yes |
| vision |
No |
Yes |
Benchmark comparison
Higher is better for all benchmarks shown.
Per-call cost on typical workloads
| Workload (in/out tokens) | DeepSeek-R1 | o3 | Cheaper by |
|---|
| Standard chat (1K / 500) |
$0.001645 |
$0.006000 |
DeepSeek-R1 by $0.004355 |
| RAG (4K / 500) |
$0.003295 |
$0.012000 |
DeepSeek-R1 by $0.008705 |
| Long doc (20K / 1K) |
$0.013190 |
$0.048000 |
DeepSeek-R1 by $0.034810 |
| Very long context (100K / 2K) |
$0.058285 |
$0.212000 |
DeepSeek-R1 by $0.153715 |
When to choose DeepSeek-R1 over o3
- Per-token input cost is 73% lower — meaningful for high-volume workloads.
- Supports streaming — o3 does not.
When to choose o3 over DeepSeek-R1
- Larger context window (200K vs 128K).
- Supports function calling — DeepSeek-R1 does not.
- Supports vision — DeepSeek-R1 does not.
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