GPT-4o Mini vs DeepSeek-V3: Detailed Comparison
Choosing between GPT-4o Mini (OpenAI) and
DeepSeek-V3 (DeepSeek) comes down to three things:
per-token pricing, context window, and which capability matters most for your workload.
GPT-4o Mini costs $0.15/M input vs
$0.27/M for DeepSeek-V3;
context windows are 128K vs
128K tokens. Detailed breakdown below.
Side-by-side specs
| Spec | GPT-4o Mini | DeepSeek-V3 |
|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | DeepSeek |
|---|
| Released | 2024-07-18 | 2024-12-26 |
|---|
| Input price |
$0.15/M |
$0.27/M |
| Output price |
$0.60/M |
$1.10/M |
| Cached input |
$0.0750/M |
$0.0700/M |
| Context window |
128K |
128K |
| Max output |
16K |
8K |
| Modalities |
text image |
text |
| Tokenizer |
o200k_base |
deepseek |
Capability matrix
| Capability | GPT-4o Mini | DeepSeek-V3 |
|---|
| function calling |
Yes |
Yes |
| json mode |
Yes |
Yes |
| vision |
Yes |
No |
| streaming |
Yes |
Yes |
Benchmark comparison
Higher is better for all benchmarks shown.
| Benchmark | Category | GPT-4o Mini | DeepSeek-V3 | Δ |
|---|
| MMLU-Pro |
general |
— |
75.9 |
— |
| HumanEval |
coding |
— |
82.6 |
— |
Per-call cost on typical workloads
| Workload (in/out tokens) | GPT-4o Mini | DeepSeek-V3 | Cheaper by |
|---|
| Standard chat (1K / 500) |
$0.000450 |
$0.000820 |
GPT-4o Mini by $0.000370 |
| RAG (4K / 500) |
$0.000900 |
$0.001630 |
GPT-4o Mini by $0.000730 |
| Long doc (20K / 1K) |
$0.003600 |
$0.006500 |
GPT-4o Mini by $0.002900 |
| Very long context (100K / 2K) |
$0.015900 |
$0.028650 |
GPT-4o Mini by $0.012750 |
When to choose GPT-4o Mini over DeepSeek-V3
- Per-token input cost is 44% lower — meaningful for high-volume workloads.
- Supports vision — DeepSeek-V3 does not.
When to choose DeepSeek-V3 over GPT-4o Mini
- DeepSeek-V3 fits when your stack is already on DeepSeek.
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