LLMversus

DeepSeek V3 vs o3: Pricing, Benchmarks & Verdict (2026)

Pricing verified Sep 14, 2026By LLMversusUpdated September 17, 2026View methodology

⚡ Quick Answer

Compare DeepSeek V3 and o3 across pricing, benchmarks, and capabilities.

Updated: September 14, 2026 · ✓ Pricing verified

Side-by-Side Comparison

FeatureDeepSeek V3o3
ProviderDeepSeekOpenAI
Input Price / 1M tokens$0.269$2.00
Output Price / 1M tokens$0.400$8.00
Context Window
128K
200K
Max Output Tokens
8,192
100,000
Arena ELO
1,358
1,340
Coding ELO
1,358
1,320
TTFT (ms)
220
600
Tokens/sec
85
15
MultimodalNoNo
JSON ModeYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
VisionNoNo
When to Use DeepSeek V3

DeepSeek V3 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 o3

o3 excels at reasoning, coding, math tasks.

Strengths:

  • Highest reasoning capability
  • Best math performance
  • Code execution

Best for:

reasoningcodingmath

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