GPT-5.6 Sol vs DeepSeek-R1
OpenAI vs DeepSeek · Prices checked 12 August 2026
There is a 12.0× price gap here. DeepSeek-R1 blends to $1.04 per million tokens; GPT-5.6 Sol to $12.50. A single 100K-input, 10K-output job costs $0.077 on DeepSeek-R1 against $0.800 on GPT-5.6 Sol.
Capability favours GPT-5.6 Sol, ahead on 2 of 2 suites they both publish. The widest gap is on LMArena Elo, where GPT-5.6 Sol leads by 120 points. GPT-5.6 Sol reads more in one request: 1,050,000 tokens of context against 64,000.
Pricing and capacity
| Metric | GPT-5.6 Sol | DeepSeek-R1 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Input / 1M tokens | $5.00 | $0.550 | 9.1× |
| Output / 1M tokens | $30.00 | $2.19 | 13.7× |
| Blended · 70/30calculated | $12.50 | $1.04 | 12.0× |
| Blended · 50/50calculated | $17.50 | $1.37 | 12.8× |
| Blended · 80/20calculated | $10.00 | $0.878 | 11.4× |
| Blended · 20/80calculated | $25.00 | $1.86 | 13.4× |
| Job cost · 100K + 10Kcalculated | $0.800 | $0.077 | 10.4× |
| Job cost · 1M + 100Kcalculated | $8.00 | $0.769 | 10.4× |
| Context window | 1,050,000 | 64,000 | 16.4× |
Input and output rates are as published by each provider. Blended and job-cost rows are calculated comparison metrics, not published prices — how they are derived.
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | GPT-5.6 Sol | DeepSeek-R1 | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 94.6% | 71% | GPT-5.6 Sol |
| LMArena Elo | 1481 Elo | 1361 Elo | GPT-5.6 Sol |
Only suites both models report are listed, so a missing score is never shown as a loss. Figures are provider-published or from public leaderboards and are not independently re-run.
What each model is for
GPT-5.6 Sol
OpenAI · Frontier
The flagship tier of the GPT-5.6 family, aimed at complex reasoning, long-horizon agentic work, coding, biology and cybersecurity. In OpenAI's naming the number is the generation and Sol is a durable capability tier, so Sol advances on its own cadence rather than being replaced by the next decimal. Standard short-context pricing is $5/$30 per MTok with cached input at $0.50; requests above 272K tokens are billed at the long-context rate of $10/$45.
- Frontier reasoning
- Long-horizon agentic execution
- Coding and code review
- Programmatic tool calling in the Responses API
DeepSeek-R1
DeepSeek · Reasoning
Open-weights reasoning model with chain-of-thought trained via RL. Comparable to o1 on math benchmarks at a fraction of the price.
- Open-weights reasoning
- Visible chain-of-thought
- Math & code
- Cheap
Frequently asked questions
Which is cheaper, GPT-5.6 Sol or DeepSeek-R1?
There is a 12.0× price gap here. DeepSeek-R1 blends to $1.04 per million tokens; GPT-5.6 Sol to $12.50. A single 100K-input, 10K-output job costs $0.077 on DeepSeek-R1 against $0.800 on GPT-5.6 Sol. Blended cost weights input at 70% and output at 30%; price your own token split for an exact answer, since the cheaper model on a blended basis is not always cheaper for your workload.
Which performs better, GPT-5.6 Sol or DeepSeek-R1?
Capability favours GPT-5.6 Sol, ahead on 2 of 2 suites they both publish. The widest gap is on LMArena Elo, where GPT-5.6 Sol leads by 120 points. These are the figures each provider or public leaderboard publishes, not results we re-run, and a benchmark average can hide the specific behaviour your workload depends on.
Which has the larger context window, GPT-5.6 Sol or DeepSeek-R1?
GPT-5.6 Sol reads more in one request: 1,050,000 tokens of context against 64,000. The context window caps everything in a single request: prompt, retrieved documents, conversation history and the model’s own output all share it.
Can I compare GPT-5.6 Sol and DeepSeek-R1 on my own numbers?
Yes. Open both in the side-by-side comparison tool to see every field at once, or use the token calculator to price your actual prompt and monthly request volume against each model. Both are free and need no sign-up.
Price it for your own workload
Related matchups
Terms used on this page
Prices and scores are recomputed on every deploy from the catalogue. Prices checked 12 August 2026.