The Known Good Updated 25 Jul 2026
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
#24 of 61
68based on 3 of 6 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#165 of 316
49.3
Output tokens per second
Price
#209 of 340
$1.15
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.70 · Out $2.50
Cache hit price
unranked
—
per 1M tokens
Context
#219 of 345
164k
tokens (~300 pages)
OpenAI: o3 Mini — OpenAI
Quality
#15 of 61
82based on 3 of 6 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#22 of 316
131.8
Output tokens per second
Price
#236 of 340
$1.93
Blended per 1M tokens
In $1.10 · Out $4.40
Cache hit price
#189 of 206
$0.55
per 1M tokens (−50%)
Context
#205 of 345
200k
tokens (~300 pages)
Summary

On the Known Good Index, DeepSeek: R1 scores 68 and OpenAI: o3 Mini scores 82 — a 13-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 49 tokens per second for DeepSeek: R1 and 132 for OpenAI: o3 Mini, with time to first token at 1.1s and 3.2s. DeepSeek: R1 accepts 164k 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 25 Jul 2026 · how these comparisons are computed →

At a glance
MetricDeepSeek: R1OpenAI: o3 Mini
Known Good Index 68 based on 3 of 6 evaluations 82 based on 3 of 6 evaluations
Blended $/1M $1.15 $1.93
Output tok/s 49 132
Context window 164k 200k
Providers 2 1
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Quality

Known Good Index and the capability indices, side by side

IndicesComponents
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 68 82
Mathematics Index 74 88
Science Index 69 78
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
MATH / AIME53 / 77
LiveBench72 / 76
LiveBench Coding67 / 83
LiveBench Data Analysis70 / 71
LiveBench Instruction Following81 / 84
LiveBench Language49 / 51
LiveBench Mathematics81 / 77
LiveBench Reasoning83 / 90
MATH Level 593 / 96

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 1,373 1,319
Text Arena (style controlled) 1,398 1,348
The Known Good

Price & Cost

Published API pricing by token type

Per token typeCache discount
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 164k 200k
Max output tokens 16k 100k
The Known Good

Speed & Latency

Median throughput and time to first token across hosting providers

Output speedTime to first token
Throughput and latency

Medians across all tracked providers, derived from OpenRouter endpoint telemetry.

MetricDeepSeek: R1OpenAI: o3 Mini
Output tokens/s 49 132
Time to first token 1.1s 3.2s
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
Azure · first party $2.60 77 — —
Novita $1.15 22 — —
OpenAI · first party — — $1.93 127

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 →