DeepSeek V3 vs Llama 4 Maverick: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Verdict

Llama 4 Maverick is significantly cheaper at $0.20/$0.60 per million tokens vs $0.27/$1.10. Llama 4 Maverick offers a larger 1049K context window vs 128K.

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureDeepSeek V3Llama 4 Maverick
ProviderDeepSeekMeta
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.200$0.150
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.770$0.600
Context Window128K1.048576M
Max Output Tokens8,19232,768
Arena ELO1,2801,290
Coding ELO1,3001,280
TTFT (ms)220250
Tokens/sec8590
MultimodalNoYes
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionNoYes
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.

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 Llama 4 Maverick

Choose Llama 4 Maverick when you need: open-source model with strong performance, very affordable via hosted providers, 1m context window, mixture-of-experts architecture. It excels at chatbots, coding, general-purpose, open-source tasks. It is also the more cost-effective option between the two. Its 1049K context window is larger, making it better for long-document processing.

Strengths:

  • Open-source model with strong performance
  • Very affordable via hosted providers
  • 1M context window
  • Mixture-of-experts architecture

Best for:

chatbotscodinggeneral-purposeopen-source

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Comparisons