DeepSeek V3 vs Kimi K3
DeepSeek V3 costs 15.6x less per output token than Kimi K3 ($0.9594 vs $15.00 per million). Updated October 22, 2026; 11 benchmarks have a result for both.
DeepSeek V3 or Kimi K3: which to pick
Only Kimi K3 has a coding score, 62.3 on the Vibe Coding Index; DeepSeek V3 has none, so the two cannot be ranked on coding.
Pick DeepSeek V3 for output tokens 15.6x cheaper ($0.9594 vs $15.00 per million).
- Shared results
- 11
- DeepSeek V3 only
- 3
- Kimi K3 only
- 106
- Like-for-like categories
- 4 of 9
Only benchmarks that tested both models count toward a pick; a result only one model has is shown but not compared.
Which one for your work
Each card is decided by one number both models carry. Where only one has it, the card says so and makes no call.
Coding
Vibe Coding Index, six public coding benchmarks
No call
Only Kimi K3 has a coding score, so no call is made.
One side not measured
Intelligence
AA Intelligence Index
No call
Only Kimi K3 has a AA Intelligence Index result, 43.6.
Directional only
Agentic work
AA Agentic Index
No call
Only Kimi K3 has a AA Agentic Index result, 50.0.
Directional only
Reasoning
GPQA Diamond
No call
Only Kimi K3 has a GPQA Diamond result, 92.9%.
Directional only
Knowledge
MMLU Pro
No call
Only Kimi K3 has a MMLU Pro result, 88.0%.
Directional only
Web design
Design Arena: websites
Kimi K3
Kimi K3 leads, 1334 against 1120.
Same board, both measured
General
Vals Index
No call
Only Kimi K3 has a Vals Index result, 53.0%.
Directional only
Long documents
Listed context window
Kimi K3
Kimi K3 takes 1.05M tokens against 164K.
Listed by OpenRouter
Everyday cost
1K input + 500 output tokens
DeepSeek V3
DeepSeek V3 $0.0008, Kimi K3 $0.011 per turn.
List prices
Cost per solved task
One SWE-bench Verified task, solved
No call
Only Kimi K3 has the number, $0.81.
Directional only
At a glance
- Coding index
- DeepSeek V3 not benchmarked, Kimi K3 62.3 from 6 benchmarks.
- Widest category
- Math, 48.3 points apart on average over 1 shared benchmark.
- Widest single gap
- OTIS Mock AIME: DeepSeek V3 48.9% against Kimi K3 97.2%, 48.3 points apart on a 0 to 100 scale.
- Output price
- DeepSeek V3 $0.9594 against Kimi K3 $15.00 per million output tokens, 15.6x apart.
- Context window
- DeepSeek V3 takes 164K tokens, Kimi K3 1.05M.
Benchmark by benchmark
First the score: boards each model leads, per category, where both have a result. Then every board, a category to a fold; bars are each result on a 0 to 100 scale, so compare the two in a row, not one row with another.
| Category | DeepSeek V3 | Bars | Kimi K3 | Ties |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reasoning | 0 | 1 | ||
| Math | 0 | 1 | ||
| Web design | 0 | 7 | ||
| General | 0 | 2 | ||
| All shared boards | 0 | 11 |
CodingDirectional onlySix of these boards feed the Vibe Coding Index26 boards, none shared
| Benchmark | DeepSeek V3 | Kimi K3 | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aider polyglot | 70.2% | Not measured | Only DeepSeek V3 measured |
| SWE-bench Lite | 30.7% | Not measured | Only DeepSeek V3 measured |
| LiveBench coding | Not measured | 59.3% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena WebDev | Not measured | 1655 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| AA Coding Index | Not measured | 76.2 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LiveCodeBench (Vals AI) | Not measured | 87.2% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| SWE-bench Verified (Vals AI) | Not measured | 93.4% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Terminal-Bench 4 (Vals AI) | Not measured | 17.2% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Vibe Code Bench (Vals AI) | Not measured | 85.0% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Code migration (Vals AI) | Not measured | 16.1% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| ProgramBench (Vals AI) | Not measured | 2.0% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| IOI (Vals AI) | Not measured | 48.9% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Vals AI) | Not measured | 80.9% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| SWE-bench Multimodal (Vals AI) | Not measured | 44.2% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Vibe Code Bench 1-100 (Vals AI) | Not measured | 18.2% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| CyberBench (Vals AI) | Not measured | 75.2% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| SciCode | Not measured | 59.5% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| FrontierCode | Not measured | 44.2% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| FrontierSWE | Not measured | 25.9% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| WeirdML | Not measured | 82.6% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| ALE-Bench | Not measured | 1524.5 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: coding | Not measured | 1508 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: software and IT | Not measured | 1499 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena WebDev: React | Not measured | 1670 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena WebDev: HTML | Not measured | 1644 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena WebDev: from an image | Not measured | 1579 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Neither model has a result on the other 13 boards here | |||
IntelligenceDirectional onlyPublic boards, shown as published, kept out of the index2 boards, none shared
| Benchmark | DeepSeek V3 | Kimi K3 | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| AA Intelligence Index | Not measured | 43.6 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | Not measured | 157.9 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
Agentic workDirectional onlyPublic boards, shown as published, kept out of the index24 boards, none shared
| Benchmark | DeepSeek V3 | Kimi K3 | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| AA Agentic Index | Not measured | 50.0 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Design Arena: agents building web apps | Not measured | 1295 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Design Arena: agents building full-stack apps | Not measured | 1315 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Design Arena: agents building mobile apps | Not measured | 1269 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Design Arena: agents building Android apps | Not measured | 1253 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Design Arena: agents building Godot games | Not measured | 1223 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Design Arena: agents building games | Not measured | 1252 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Design Arena: HTML slides | Not measured | 1206 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Design Arena: PowerPoint slides | Not measured | 1247 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Design Arena: spreadsheets | Not measured | 1070 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LiveBench research | Not measured | 79.0% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LiveBench browser | Not measured | 16.0% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LiveBench long agentic | Not measured | 42.8% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Finance Agent (Vals AI) | Not measured | 53.1% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Tax Agent Bench (Vals AI) | Not measured | 33.4% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Legal Research Bench (Vals AI) | Not measured | 46.1% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Harvey's Legal Agent Benchmark (Vals AI) | Not measured | 12.9% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Excel Modeling Benchmark (Vals AI) | Not measured | 66.7% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| BioMysteryBench (Vals AI) | Not measured | 72.6% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Terminal-Bench-Science (Vals AI) | Not measured | 1.4% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Time Horizon Index (Vals AI) | Not measured | 10.5% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| APEX-Agents | Not measured | 47.8% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| PostTrainBench | Not measured | 32.0% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Vending-Bench 2 | Not measured | $5,165 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Neither model has a result on the other 17 boards here | |||
ReasoningLike-for-likePublic boards, shown as published, kept out of the index01
| Benchmark | DeepSeek V3 | Kimi K3 | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | Not measured | 92.9% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LiveBench reasoning | Not measured | 90.7% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| MMMU Pro (Vals AI) | Not measured | 88.2% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| GPQA Diamond (Artificial Analysis run) | Not measured | 93.5% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Humanity's Last Exam (Artificial Analysis run) | Not measured | 46.9% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| GPQA Diamond (Epoch AI run) | 71.2% | 93.1% | Kimi K3 |
| ARC-AGI | Not measured | 94.5% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| ARC-AGI-2 | Not measured | 60.4% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| SimpleBench | Not measured | 60.7% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Chess puzzles | Not measured | 37.0% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Mystery game puzzles | Not measured | 26.0% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: hard prompts | Not measured | 1495 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: expert | Not measured | 1520 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: hard prompts in English | Not measured | 1496 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 52.3% | Not measured | Only DeepSeek V3 measured |
| Neither model has a result on the other 7 boards here | |||
MathLike-for-likePublic boards, shown as published, kept out of the index01
| Benchmark | DeepSeek V3 | Kimi K3 | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME | 48.9% | 97.2% | Kimi K3 |
| FrontierMath, tiers 1 to 3 | Not measured | 72.2% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| FrontierMath, tier 4 | Not measured | 39.0% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| ProofBench | Not measured | 87.0% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: math | Not measured | 1494 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: mathematical work | Not measured | 1505 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Neither model has a result on the other 7 boards here | |||
KnowledgeDirectional onlyPublic boards, shown as published, kept out of the index11 boards, none shared
| Benchmark | DeepSeek V3 | Kimi K3 | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| MMLU Pro | Not measured | 88.0% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LegalBench (Vals AI) | Not measured | 86.2% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| CorpFin (Vals AI) | Not measured | 71.6% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| TaxEval (Vals AI) | Not measured | 75.7% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| MortgageTax (Vals AI) | Not measured | 66.3% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| MedCode (Vals AI) | Not measured | 49.4% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| SimpleQA Verified | Not measured | 50.6% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: science | Not measured | 1508 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: medicine and healthcare | Not measured | 1489 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: legal and government | Not measured | 1503 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: business and finance | Not measured | 1470 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Neither model has a result on the other 7 boards here | |||
Web designLike-for-likePublic boards, shown as published, kept out of the index07
| Benchmark | DeepSeek V3 | Kimi K3 | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| Design Arena: websites | 1120 | 1334 | Kimi K3 |
| Design Arena: UI components | 1090 | 1341 | Kimi K3 |
| Design Arena: game dev | 1053 | 1358 | Kimi K3 |
| Design Arena: data viz | 1089 | 1351 | Kimi K3 |
| Design Arena: 3D | 1086 | 1387 | Kimi K3 |
| Design Arena: all code categories | 1108 | 1360 | Kimi K3 |
| Design Arena: SVG | 976 | 1302 | Kimi K3 |
| LiveBench design | Not measured | 77.2% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Neither model has a result on the other 1 board here | |||
GeneralLike-for-likePublic boards, shown as published, kept out of the index02
| Benchmark | DeepSeek V3 | Kimi K3 | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vals Index | Not measured | 53.0% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LiveBench data analysis | Not measured | 78.7% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Public Benefits Bench (Vals AI) | Not measured | 68.2% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| SAGE (Vals AI) | Not measured | 52.8% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| MedScribe (Vals AI) | Not measured | 88.0% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Vals Multimodal Index | Not measured | 73.4% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Long context reasoning (AA-LCR) | Not measured | 88.7% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| DTBench | 62.7% | 91.2% | Kimi K3 |
| LMCA | 15.2% | 52.7% | Kimi K3 |
| Surface Evolver Bench | Not measured | 95.0% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Furniture assembly | Not measured | 34.2% | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text | Not measured | 1476 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: instruction following | Not measured | 1485 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: creative writing | Not measured | 1457 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: English | Not measured | 1481 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: non-English | Not measured | 1466 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: Chinese | Not measured | 1529 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: German | Not measured | 1490 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: Japanese | Not measured | 1494 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: Korean | Not measured | 1460 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: French | Not measured | 1492 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: Spanish | Not measured | 1472 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: Russian | Not measured | 1485 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: Polish | Not measured | 1458 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: multi-turn | Not measured | 1489 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: longer queries | Not measured | 1494 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: writing and language | Not measured | 1471 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| LMArena Text: entertainment and media | Not measured | 1453 | Only Kimi K3 measured |
| Neither model has a result on the other 18 boards here | |||
Image generationNot comparablePublic boards, shown as published, kept out of the index0 boards, none shared
| Benchmark | DeepSeek V3 | Kimi K3 | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| Neither model has a result on 5 boards here | |||
What each workload costs
Three fixed token mixes at each model's listed price, so per-token rates become a bill.
Chat turn
1K input + 500 output tokens
DeepSeek V3 costs less
Repository review
50K input + 3K output tokens
DeepSeek V3 costs less
Agent loop
200K input + 10K output tokens
DeepSeek V3 costs less
Listed OpenRouter rates, without cache or batch discounts. A workload that does not fit a model's context window would need splitting.
Specification differences
The leading value in a row is marked; a row with a missing value names no leader. Our two rows are marked in red.
| Specification | DeepSeek V3 | MoonshotAI Kimi K3 |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | DeepSeek | Moonshot AI |
| Weights | Open weights | Open weights |
| Released | December 26, 2024 | July 16, 2026 |
| Context window | 164K | 1.05M |
| Input $/Mtok | $0.2887 | $3.00 |
| Output $/Mtok | $0.9594 | $15.00 |
| Coding index | Not benchmarked | 62.3 |
| Independent measurements behind it | 0 | 6 |
| Cost per solved task | Not computable | $0.81 |
| Source | OpenRouter listing | OpenRouter listing |
Questions
Is DeepSeek V3 better than Kimi K3 for coding?
Only Kimi K3 has a coding score, 62.3 on the Vibe Coding Index; DeepSeek V3 has none, so the two cannot be ranked on coding. Pick DeepSeek V3 for output tokens 15.6x cheaper ($0.9594 vs $15.00 per million).
Which is cheaper, DeepSeek V3 or Kimi K3?
DeepSeek V3 costs $0.2887 per million input tokens and $0.9594 per million output tokens; Kimi K3 costs $3.00 and $15.00. Cost per solved task is known for Kimi K3 only.
Which has the bigger context window, DeepSeek V3 or Kimi K3?
Kimi K3, with 1.05M tokens against 164K.
How many benchmarks is the DeepSeek V3 vs Kimi K3 comparison based on?
11 benchmarks have a result for both models as of October 22, 2026. DeepSeek V3's coding index rests on 0 independent benchmarks and Kimi K3's on 6. Where only one model has a result, the page says so instead of naming a winner.