The Known Good Updated 9 Sep 2026 Subscribe
DeepSeek: R1 vs OpenAI: o3 Mini ·DeepSeek vs OpenAI

DeepSeek: R1 vs OpenAI: o3 Mini — head-to-head comparison

DeepSeek: R1 profile OpenAI: o3 Mini profile All comparisons
DeepSeek: R1 — DeepSeek
Quality
#22 of 65
75based on 4 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#311 of 341
19.8
Output tokens per second
Price
#259 of 450
$1.15
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.70 · Out $2.50
Cache hit price
unranked
—
per 1M tokens
Context
#455 of 487
64k
tokens (~98 pages)
OpenAI: o3 Mini — OpenAI
Quality
#14 of 65
86based on 4 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#33 of 341
122.6
Output tokens per second
Price
#309 of 450
$1.93
Blended per 1M tokens
In $1.10 · Out $4.40
Cache hit price
#322 of 344
$0.55
per 1M tokens (−50%)
Context
#334 of 487
200k
tokens (~300 pages)
Summary

On the Known Good Index, DeepSeek: R1 scores 75 and OpenAI: o3 Mini scores 86 — a 11-point lead for OpenAI: o3 Mini. They share 10 published evaluations, with DeepSeek: R1 ahead on 1 and OpenAI: o3 Mini ahead on 9.

Blended pricing is $1.15 per 1M tokens for DeepSeek: R1 and $1.93 for OpenAI: o3 Mini — DeepSeek: R1 is about 1.7× cheaper.

Throughput is 20 tokens per second for DeepSeek: R1 and 123 for OpenAI: o3 Mini, with time to first token at 1.1s and 3.3s. DeepSeek: R1 accepts 64k tokens of context against 200k.

DeepSeek: R1 is open weights under Open weights (unrestricted); OpenAI: o3 Mini is proprietary. 3 tracked hosts serve one or both.

Generated from tracked data on 9 Sep 2026 · how these comparisons are computed →

At a glance
MetricDeepSeek: R1OpenAI: o3 Mini
Known Good Index 75 based on 4 of 7 evaluations 86 based on 4 of 7 evaluations
Blended $/1M $1.15 $1.93
Output tok/s 20 123
Context window 64k 200k
Providers 2 1
Jump to section

Quality

Known Good Index and the capability indices, side by side

Index scores

Each index is min-max normalised across tracked models and scaled 0–100 from published evaluations. We do not run these evaluations.

MetricDeepSeek: R1OpenAI: o3 Mini
Known Good Index 75 86
Mathematics Index 74 88
Reasoning Index 77 85
Openness Index 60 5
The Known Good

Quality Breakdown

Every evaluation both models report a published score for

Evaluations both models report

Bar = DeepSeek: R1 · marker = OpenAI: o3 Mini · scores ingested from Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0), LiveBench (Apache-2.0)

GPQA Diamond69 / 77
Mock AIME 2024–2553 / 77
MATH Level 593 / 96
LiveBench72 / 76
LiveBench Coding67 / 83
LiveBench Data Analysis70 / 71
LiveBench Instruction Following81 / 84
LiveBench Language49 / 51
LiveBench Mathematics81 / 77
LiveBench Reasoning83 / 90

Right-hand figures read DeepSeek: R1 / OpenAI: o3 Mini. DeepSeek: R1 leads on 1 of 10, OpenAI: o3 Mini on 9.

The Known Good

Arena Elo

Human preference rating from blind pairwise votes

Arena ratings

Elo from blind pairwise votes, ingested from Arena. Higher is better.

MetricDeepSeek: R1OpenAI: o3 Mini
Text Arena 1,372 1,319
Text Arena (style controlled) 1,398 1,348
The Known Good

Price & Cost

Published API pricing by token type

Published pricing

USD per 1M tokens. Blended is a 3:1 input:output mix. Live from OpenRouter, cross-checked against models.dev. Lower is better.

MetricDeepSeek: R1OpenAI: o3 Mini
Input $/1M $0.70 $1.10
Output $/1M $2.50 $4.40
Blended $/1M $1.15 $1.93
Cache read $/1M — $0.550
The Known Good
We publish blended price rather than cost-per-task. Cost-per-task requires token counts from an evaluation suite we do not run. Blended price is computed from published rates and is fully reproducible — see the pricing methodology.

Context Window

Maximum input accepted and maximum output emitted

Context and output limits

Provider-declared limits, from metadata via models.dev and OpenRouter. Higher is better.

MetricDeepSeek: R1OpenAI: o3 Mini
Context window 64k 200k
Max output tokens 16k 100k
The Known Good

Speed & Latency

Mean throughput and time to first token across hosting providers, over successful measurements from the last 48 hours

Throughput and latency

Means across all tracked providers over successful measurements from the last 48 hours, derived from OpenRouter endpoint telemetry.

MetricDeepSeek: R1OpenAI: o3 Mini
Output tokens/s 20 123
Time to first token 1.1s 3.3s
The Known Good

Providers

Which hosts serve each model, and at what price and speed

3 hosts
Full provider benchmarks →
Provider DeepSeek: R1 blendedDeepSeek: R1 tok/s OpenAI: o3 Mini blendedOpenAI: o3 Mini tok/s
Novita $1.15 19 — —
Azure · first party $2.60 — — —
OpenAI · first party — — $1.93 198

Per-host pricing and telemetry from OpenRouter. A dash means that host does not serve that model.

The Known Good
Sources for this page
Pricing & providers — OpenRouter Metadata — models.dev Benchmarks — Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)Benchmarks — LiveBench (Apache-2.0)Elo — Arena Full attribution →