SummitGovOnline

DeepSeek R1 vs OpenAI o3 Mini

Side-by-side comparison of pricing, capabilities, benchmarks, and use case fit.

D

DeepSeek R1

DeepSeek

Overall 77
reasoning
View model →
O

OpenAI o3 Mini

OpenAI

Overall 75
reasoning
View model →

Capability radar

Normalized coding, reasoning, writing, vision, context, and value

CodingReasoningWritingVisionContextValue
DeepSeek R1OpenAI o3 Mini
Comparison of DeepSeek R1 vs OpenAI o3 Mini
MetricDeepSeek R1OpenAI o3 Mini
Input Price / 1M$0.55$1.10
Output Price / 1M$2.19$4.40
Combined Price / 1M$2.74$5.50
Context Window64,000200,000
Coding Score9490
Reasoning Score9591
Vision Score3535
AudioNoNo
StreamingYesYes
Function CallingYesYes
Latency Tierreasoningreasoning
Release Date1/20/20251/31/2025

DeepSeek R1 — Strengths & Weaknesses

Strengths

  • Reasoning at low cost
  • Open weights available

Weaknesses

  • No vision
  • Slower inference
  • 64K context

OpenAI o3 Mini — Strengths & Weaknesses

Strengths

  • Affordable reasoning
  • Strong math/coding

Weaknesses

  • No multimodal
  • Higher latency than GPT-4o

Use Case Verdicts

Coding

DeepSeek R1

DeepSeek R1 scores 94 vs 90 on coding benchmarks.

General Chat

DeepSeek R1

DeepSeek R1 leads on writing quality (82 vs 82).

Long Context

OpenAI o3 Mini

OpenAI o3 Mini offers 200K tokens vs 64K.

Cost Efficiency

DeepSeek R1

DeepSeek R1 is cheaper at $2.74/M combined vs $5.50/M.

Enterprise Use

DeepSeek R1

DeepSeek R1 combines strong reasoning, tooling, and context for enterprise workloads.

Agent Workflows

DeepSeek R1

DeepSeek R1 is better suited for agentic workflows with tool use and coding capability.