DeepSeek
Hangzhou lab whose V and R series models are released under permissive licences and undercut Western API pricing by an order of magnitude.
Full DeepSeek record →Head to head
DeepSeek vs Qwen Chat
DeepSeek (DeepSeek) and Qwen Chat (Alibaba) both sit in Writing. Qwen Chat shipped more tracked changes in the last 30 days (10 vs 9). Every value below comes from the latest crawl of the vendors' own pages.
| Attribute | DeepSeek DeepSeek | Qwen Chat Alibaba |
|---|---|---|
| Segment | Writing | Writing |
| Version | DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash | Qwen3-2507 |
| Entry cost | Pay-as-you-go API pricing based on token consumption. No flat monthly fee. | Free to chat on official website |
| Pricing tiers | deepseek-flash (Input Cache Hit - Off-Peak) $0.003 · deepseek-flash (Input Cache Hit - Peak) $0.006 · deepseek-flash (Input Cache Miss - Off-Peak) $0.15 · deepseek-flash (Input Cache Miss - Peak) $0.3 · deepseek-flash (Output - Off-Peak) $0.6 · deepseek-flash (Output - Peak) $1.2 | Free free |
| Model stack | DeepSeek-R1 · DeepSeek-V3.2 · deepseek-v4-flash · DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 · DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp · DeepSeek-V4-Pro · DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813 · DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash | Qwen2.5 · Qwen3 · Qwen3 (Qwen3-2504) · Qwen3-2504 · Qwen3-2507 · Qwen3-Instruct-2507 · Qwen3-Max · Qwen3-Thinking-2507 · Qwen3-VL · QwQ |
| Context window | 1M | 256K |
| Public API | ||
| Routes models | ||
| Changes / 30d | 9 | 10 |
| Origin | China | China |
| Capabilities | Reasoning mode, Open weights (MIT), OpenAI-compatible API, Context caching, Function calling, Thinking Mode, Context Caching, JSON Output | Web search, Image and video generation, Deep research, Translation, Open-weight siblings, natural language understanding, text generation, vision understanding |
Qwen Chat
Consumer and enterprise assistant fronting the Qwen series, the most-downloaded open model family on Hugging Face.
Full Qwen Chat record →