Raw intelligenceTie
On text reasoning and code, V4 trades blows with GPT-5.6 far more often than the price gap suggests.
PriceDeepSeek wins
Free chat; API around $0.14 per million input tokens (est.) — roughly 3% of frontier pricing. Nothing else is close.
FeaturesChatGPT wins
Voice, images, memory, apps, deep research — DeepSeek is a chat box; ChatGPT is a platform.
Coding on a budgetDeepSeek wins
Near-frontier code assistance without a subscription made DeepSeek the student developer’s default.
Data comfortChatGPT wins
DeepSeek is a China-based service; for sensitive personal or business content, many users prefer OpenAI’s jurisdiction. Judge by your own bar.
On paper