DeepSeek-V3 vs Gemini 2.5 Flash: Detailed Comparison

Choosing between DeepSeek-V3 (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-V3 costs $0.27/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

SpecDeepSeek-V3Gemini 2.5 Flash
ProviderDeepSeekGoogle
Released2024-12-262025-04-09
Input price $0.27/M $0.30/M
Output price $1.10/M $2.50/M
Cached input $0.0700/M $0.0750/M
Context window 128K 1.0M
Max output 8K 66K
Modalities text text image audio video
Tokenizer deepseek gemini

Capability matrix

CapabilityDeepSeek-V3Gemini 2.5 Flash
function calling Yes Yes
json mode Yes Yes
streaming Yes Yes
vision No Yes
audio No Yes
video No Yes

Benchmark comparison

Higher is better for all benchmarks shown.

BenchmarkCategoryDeepSeek-V3Gemini 2.5 FlashΔ
MMLU-Pro general 75.9
HumanEval coding 82.6

Per-call cost on typical workloads

Workload (in/out tokens)DeepSeek-V3Gemini 2.5 FlashCheaper by
Standard chat (1K / 500) $0.000820 $0.001550 DeepSeek-V3 by $0.000730
RAG (4K / 500) $0.001630 $0.002450 DeepSeek-V3 by $0.000820
Long doc (20K / 1K) $0.006500 $0.008500 DeepSeek-V3 by $0.002000
Very long context (100K / 2K) $0.028650 $0.033750 DeepSeek-V3 by $0.005100

When to choose DeepSeek-V3 over Gemini 2.5 Flash

  • Per-token input cost is 10% lower — meaningful for high-volume workloads.

When to choose Gemini 2.5 Flash over DeepSeek-V3

  • Larger context window (1.0M vs 128K).
  • Supports vision — DeepSeek-V3 does not.
  • Supports audio — DeepSeek-V3 does not.
  • Supports video — DeepSeek-V3 does not.

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