ModelRefs / o3 vs DeepSeek V3
o3 vs DeepSeek V3
o3 vs DeepSeek V3: side-by-side benchmarks, pricing, context windows, coding ability and deployment. Pick the right model for your stack.
Overview
DeepSeek V3: DeepSeek V3 is DeepSeek's December 2024 open-weights Mixture-of-Experts model, activating 37 billion of 671 billion total parameters per token across a 128,000-token context window. It ships under the MIT licence with published weights and a technical report, and DeepSeek reports its own evaluation table for the text chat model under an 8,000-token output limit.
o3: o3 is OpenAI's April 2025 reasoning model, applying deliberate chain-of-thought computation at inference time to mathematics, science and competitive programming tasks, and the release that brought OpenAI's scalable test-time compute approach to its production API. OpenAI has since deprecated it, scheduling the o3-2025-04-16 snapshot to shut down on 11 December 2026 with gpt-5.6-sol as the replacement.
Context window: DeepSeek V3 accepts up to 128,000 tokens, o3 up to 200,000. Confirm the limit for your specific deployment channel before relying on it.
DeepSeek V3 vs o3 at a glance
| Attribute | DeepSeek V3 | o3 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | DeepSeek | OpenAI |
| Released | 2024-12-26 | 2025-04-16 |
| Context window | 128,000 tokens | 200,000 tokens |
| Input price | $0.27/M tokens | $10/M tokens |
| Output price | $1.1/M tokens | $40/M tokens |
| Licence | MIT | Proprietary |
| Self-hostable | Yes, open weights | No, hosted only |
| Modalities | text | text, vision |
Where they differ most
- Cost Efficiency: DeepSeek V3 85%, o3 13%. DeepSeek V3 leads on this dimension.
- Reasoning: DeepSeek V3 72%, o3 86%. o3 leads on this dimension.
Capability scores are ModelRefs' own derived signals, not vendor claims or benchmark results. Validate against your own workload before relying on them.
Continue your research
Use these connected ModelRefs sections to compare alternatives, inspect implementation paths, and review the evidence and governance boundaries relevant to o3 vs DeepSeek V3.
Frequently asked questions
Which is better, o3 or DeepSeek V3?
o3 and DeepSeek V3 target different workloads — see the benchmark and pricing tables for a side-by-side answer.
Is o3 cheaper than DeepSeek V3?
Compare $0.0100 vs $0.00027 on this page.