Grok 3 vs DeepSeek-V3

xAI vs DeepSeek · Prices checked November 11, 2026

There is a 13.4× price gap here. DeepSeek-V3 blends to $0.4910 per million tokens; Grok 3 to $6.60. A single 100K-input, 10K-output job costs $0.0409 on DeepSeek-V3 against $0.4500 on Grok 3.

Pricing and capacity

RatesUSD per million tokens. Prices checked November 11, 2026.

Published token pricing and context window for Grok 3 and DeepSeek-V3
MetricGrok 3DeepSeek-V3Difference
Input / 1M tokens$3.00$0.32009.4×
Output / 1M tokens$15.00$0.890016.9×
Blended · 70/30calculated$6.60$0.491013.4×
Blended · 50/50calculated$9.00$0.605014.9×
Blended · 80/20calculated$5.40$0.434012.4×
Blended · 20/80calculated$12.60$0.776016.2×
Job cost · 100K + 10Kcalculated$0.4500$0.040911.0×
Job cost · 1M + 100Kcalculated$4.50$0.409011.0×
Context window131,00064,0002.0×

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.

Capability favours Grok 3, ahead on 3 of 5 suites they both publish. The widest gap is on LMArena Elo, where Grok 3 leads by 53 points. Grok 3 reads more in one request: 131,000 tokens of context against 64,000.

Benchmarks

Benchmark scores both Grok 3 and DeepSeek-V3 report
BenchmarkGrok 3DeepSeek-V3Leader
MMLU86%88.5%DeepSeek-V3
GPQA Diamond75.4%59.1%Grok 3
HumanEval86%89%DeepSeek-V3
SWE-bench Verified45%42%Grok 3
LMArena Elo1411 Elo1358 EloGrok 3

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

Grok 3

xAI · Frontier

xAI's flagship Grok. Real-time access to the X firehose makes it strong on current events and live commentary.

  • Real-time X data
  • Less filtered tone
  • Strong general reasoning

DeepSeek-V3

DeepSeek · Frontier

Open-weights frontier model that matched GPT-4-class quality at a fraction of the inference cost. Sparked the late-2024 cost reset.

  • Frontier quality, open weights
  • Aggressive pricing
  • Strong code & math
  • MoE architecture

Frequently asked questions

Which is cheaper, Grok 3 or DeepSeek-V3?

There is a 13.4× price gap here. DeepSeek-V3 blends to $0.4910 per million tokens; Grok 3 to $6.60. A single 100K-input, 10K-output job costs $0.0409 on DeepSeek-V3 against $0.4500 on Grok 3. 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, Grok 3 or DeepSeek-V3?

Capability favours Grok 3, ahead on 3 of 5 suites they both publish. The widest gap is on LMArena Elo, where Grok 3 leads by 53 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, Grok 3 or DeepSeek-V3?

Grok 3 reads more in one request: 131,000 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 Grok 3 and DeepSeek-V3 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 November 11, 2026.