DeepSeek: R1 vs OpenAI: GPT-4.1

Side-by-side specs, pricing, and benchmarks. Pick a winner for your team's use case.

Use it in a Space

Spin up a Switchy Space with either model — your whole team @-mentions it with shared context, pooled credits, one memory.

Pricing

DeepSeek: R1OpenAI: GPT-4.1

Input $/Mtok$0.70 · $2.00

Output $/Mtok$2.50 · $8.00

Context window

DeepSeek: R1OpenAI: GPT-4.1

DeepSeek: R164K tokens

OpenAI: GPT-4.11048K tokens

Bars use square-root scaling so a 1M-token window doesn't crush a 200K one.

Release timeline

DeepSeek: R1OpenAI: GPT-4.1

2025-01-20

2025-04-14

2024-12-21today

DeepSeek: R1

Provider: deepseek
Context: 64k
Input $/Mtok: $0.70
Output $/Mtok: $2.50
Max output: 16000
Modalities: text

OpenAI: GPT-4.1

Provider: openai
Context: 1048k
Input $/Mtok: $2.00
Output $/Mtok: $8.00
Max output: —
Modalities: image, text, file

Price delta

DeepSeek: R1 is $1.30/Mtok cheaper than OpenAI: GPT-4.1 on input. Output: DeepSeek: R1 is $5.50/Mtok cheaper than OpenAI: GPT-4.1.

Which to pick

Pick **DeepSeek R1** when reasoning per dollar is the optimisation. At $0.55 in / $2.19 out per Mtok it is roughly 3.6x cheaper on input than GPT-4.1 and 3.7x cheaper on output, with frontier-tier reasoning quality on math, code, and structured problem-solving. The trade-off is rougher prose, weaker tool-use ergonomics, and a 164k context window vs GPT-4.1's 1M. Pick **GPT-4.1** when long context wins — anything that needs more than ~160k tokens in a single turn — or when the workload involves reliable function-calling against an OpenAI-shaped pipeline. On polished general-purpose conversation GPT-4.1 still feels smoother; reach for R1 on the analytical lanes where the answer is what matters and the prose around it is incidental.

Full DeepSeek: R1 verdict →Full OpenAI: GPT-4.1 verdict →