Brand comparison
ChatGPT vs DeepSeek
The short answer
ChatGPT leads on raw capability — its strongest model, GPT-6 Astra, posts the higher combined coding and reasoning score in this comparison. ChatGPT is the cheaper way in: GPT-6 Luna blends to $0.22 per million tokens, which is what matters once you are running volume rather than evaluating. ChatGPT offers the wider context window at 1.05M tokens. Most teams end up using both — one for the hard problems, one for everything else.
ChatGPT
OpenAI's consumer product and the most widely used AI assistant. Strongest on multimodal breadth — voice, image generation, browsing, and agent tooling all ship in the same subscription. The API line-up spans a full frontier-to-budget ladder on one 1.05M-token context.
- API models
- 10
- Max context
- 1.05M
DeepSeek
An open-weights family that undercuts every closed lab on price by an order of magnitude. Self-hostable, which removes per-token cost entirely if you have the hardware, at the cost of running the infrastructure yourself.
- API models
- 5
- Max context
- 1M
Subscriptions
What ChatGPT and DeepSeek charge a person per month.
ChatGPT sells a consumer subscription; DeepSeek is used mainly through its API or bundled elsewhere, so there is no like-for-like monthly price to compare. If you want a chat product you pay for monthly, that decision is already made for you.
ChatGPT
- ChatGPT FreeFree
- ChatGPT Go$8.00/mo
- ChatGPT Plus$20.00/mo
- ChatGPT Pro 100$100.00/mo
- ChatGPT Pro 200$200.00/mo
- ChatGPT Pro 500$500.00/mo
DeepSeek
No consumer subscription tracked.
Plan prices last verified October 9, 2026.
API pricing, tier by tier
ChatGPT and DeepSeek line-ups matched by capability tier.
| Tier | ChatGPT | DeepSeek |
|---|---|---|
| Flagship | GPT-6 Astra$10.00 / $50.00 per 1M in / out | DeepSeek V4 Pro$1.32 / $3.96 per 1M in / out |
| Mid-range | GPT-6.1 Sol$2.00 / $10.00 per 1M in / out | — |
| Budget | GPT-6 Luna$0.10 / $0.50 per 1M in / out | DeepSeek V4.1 Flash$0.30 / $1.20 per 1M in / out |
At 10M + 2M tokens a month — a realistic mid-size production workload — the cheapest option from ChatGPT (GPT-6 Luna) runs about $2.00, against roughly $5.40 for DeepSeek's DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. Run your own numbers on the calculator before committing: the mix of input to output tokens moves this more than the headline price does.
Which one to pick
- For the hardest reasoning and long agentic runs: ChatGPT, specifically GPT-6 Astra.
- For high-volume production where cost dominates: ChatGPT, specifically GPT-6 Luna at $0.22 blended per million tokens.
- For whole-repository or long-document work: ChatGPT, with up to 1.05M tokens of context.
Model-level comparisons
The brand answer is a summary. These pages compare the specific ChatGPT and DeepSeek models against each other with full benchmark and cost breakdowns.