ChatGPT vs DeepSeek
Two product families, side by side — subscriptions, API pricing, and which one to reach for.
The short answer
ChatGPT leads on raw capability — its strongest model, GPT-5.6 Sol, posts the higher combined coding and reasoning score in this comparison. DeepSeek is the cheaper way in: DeepSeek V3.2 blends to $0.30 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
- 6
- 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
- 3
- Max context
- 128K
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 Plus$20/mo
- ChatGPT Pro$200/mo
DeepSeek
No consumer subscription tracked.
Plan prices last verified 2026-07-21.
API pricing, tier by tier
ChatGPT and DeepSeek line-ups matched by capability tier.
| Tier | ChatGPT | DeepSeek |
|---|---|---|
| Flagship | GPT-5.6 Sol$5.00 / $30.00 per 1M in / out | DeepSeek R1$0.55 / $2.19 per 1M in / out |
| Mid-range | GPT-5.6 Terra$2.00 / $12.00 per 1M in / out | — |
| Budget | GPT-5.6 Luna$0.20 / $1.20 per 1M in / out | DeepSeek V3.2$0.26 / $0.38 per 1M in / out |
At 10M + 2M tokens a month — a realistic mid-size production workload — the cheapest option from ChatGPT (GPT-5.6 Luna) runs about $4.40, against roughly $3.36 for DeepSeek's DeepSeek V3.2. 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-5.6 Sol.
- For high-volume production where cost dominates: DeepSeek, specifically DeepSeek V3.2 at $0.30 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.