LLMversus

DeepSeek V3 vs Grok 3: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Pricing verified Apr 20, 2026By LLMversusUpdated June 14, 2026View methodology

⚡ Quick Answer

DeepSeek V3 is significantly cheaper at $0.27/$1.10 per million tokens vs $3.00/$15.00. Grok 3 ranks higher overall with an Arena ELO of 1300 vs 1280.

Updated: April 20, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureDeepSeek V3Grok 3
ProviderDeepSeekxAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.259$3.00
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.420$15.00
Context Window
128K
200K
Max Output Tokens
8,192
8,192
Arena ELO
1,280
1,285
Coding ELO
1,300
1,280
TTFT (ms)
220
200
Tokens/sec
85
90
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionNoNo
When to Use DeepSeek V3

Choose DeepSeek V3 when you need: excellent coding performance for its price, open-source and self-hostable, very competitive benchmarks, extremely affordable. It excels at coding, general-purpose, cost-sensitive, open-source tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two.

Strengths:

  • Excellent coding performance for its price
  • Open-source and self-hostable
  • Very competitive benchmarks
  • Extremely affordable

Best for:

codinggeneral-purposecost-sensitiveopen-source
When to Use Grok 3

Choose Grok 3 when you need: strong benchmark performance, good reasoning capabilities, vision and multimodal support, fast for its capability tier. It excels at general-purpose, reasoning, coding tasks.

Strengths:

  • Latest xAI model
  • Strong reasoning
  • Large context

Best for:

general-purposecodingreasoning

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Comparisons

Claude Opus 4 vs Grok 3Claude Opus 4 vs DeepSeek V3Gemini 2 5 Pro vs Grok 3DeepSeek V3 vs Gemini 2 5 ProGrok 3 vs O3DeepSeek V3 vs O3Deepseek R1 vs Grok 3Deepseek R1 vs DeepSeek V3Grok 3 vs O1DeepSeek V3 vs O1Grok 3 vs Qwen 3 235bDeepSeek V3 vs Qwen 3 235bGemini Exp 1206 vs Grok 3DeepSeek V3 vs Gemini Exp 1206Gpt 4 5 vs Grok 3DeepSeek V3 vs Gpt 4 5Grok 3 vs Groq Deepseek R1DeepSeek V3 vs Groq Deepseek R1Grok 3 vs Llama 4 MaverickDeepSeek V3 vs Llama 4 Maverick